In 2015, ARIN (responsible for the North American region) registrar to exhaust its IPv4 pool. And in November, addresses also ran out for RIPE, which allocates resources in Europe and Asia.
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The situation in RIPE
In 2012, RIPE announced the start of distribution of the last /8 block. Since then, each registrar's client could receive only 1024 addresses, which slightly slowed the depletion of the pool. But by 2015, RIPE had 16 million free IPs, and by summer 2019, this number had decreased .
At the end of November, RIPE , in which they reported that the registrar had given out the last IPs and its resources were exhausted. From that moment on, the pool will only be replenished with addresses returned by various organizations. They will be distributed in order in blocks of /24.
Who still has addresses
IPv4 is still available from three registrars, but in recent years they have been operating in a 'strict economy mode.' For example, the African AFRINIC has imposed restrictions on the number of addresses issued and strict checks on their intended use. Despite all measures, experts predict that the IPv4 from the African registrar will be exhausted by March 2020. However, there is an opinion that this may happen even earlier—in January.
A few resources are still left with the Latin American LACNIC—it is distributing the last /8 block. Representatives of the organization say they give out a maximum of 1024 addresses per company. At the same time, blocks can only be received by those clients who have never received them before. Similar measures have been implemented in the Asian APNIC. However, the organization one-fifth of the /8 pool left, which will also run out soon.
It's not over yet.
Experts note that the 'lifespan' of IPv4 can be extended. It is enough to return unused addresses to the general pool. For example, Ford Motor Company and Prudential Securities more than 16 million public IPv4 addresses. In a themed thread on Hacker News , that these organizations do not need such a large number of IPs.
Moreover, returned addresses should be issued not in blocks as before, but in strictly necessary quantities. Another resident of HN , noted that providers Spectrum/Charter and Verizon are already adopting this practice—they are issuing one IP from /24 instead of a whole block /30.
Some materials from our blog on Habr:
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Another solution to the shortage of addresses could be their buying and selling at auctions. For example, in 2017, MIT engineers , reported that the university owned 14 million unused IP addresses — most of them were decided to be sold. A similar story occurred in early December in Russia. The Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROC) announced the closure of the local Internet registrar LIR. After that, it approximately 490,000 IPv4 addresses to the Czech company Reliable Communications. Experts estimated the total value of the pool at $9-12 million.
But if companies start to resell IP addresses to each other en masse, to the expansion of routing tables. However, there is a solution here as well — (Locator/ID Separation Protocol). The authors here propose using two addresses for addressing within the network. One for device identification and the other for creating a tunnel between servers. This approach allows for the removal of addresses that cannot be grouped into a single block from BGP tables — as a result, the routing table grows more slowly. Support for LISP is already being implemented by companies like Cisco and LANCOM Systems (developing SD-WAN). massive
migration to IPv6 have introduced fees Overall, manufacturers of networking equipment and Internet providers are eager to transition to IPv6. However, they regularly face challenges during migration. We will prepare a separate article about these challenges and ways to solve them.
GNUnet 0.12, a framework for building secure P2P networks, is now available
What we write about in the VAS Experts corporate blog:
Source: habr.com
