In 2015 ARIN (responsible for the North American region) a registrar that has exhausted the IPv4 pool. And in November, RIPE also ran out of addresses, which distributes resources in Europe and Asia.
/Unsplash/
The situation in RIPE
In 2012 RIPE about the beginning of distribution of the last block /8. Since then, each registrar client could only get 1024 addresses, which slowed down the pool depletion a little. But in 2015, RIPE had 16 million free IPs left, in the summer of 2019 this number decreased .
At the end of November RIPE , which reported that the registrar gave the last IP and its resources are exhausted. From now on, the pool will be replenished only at the expense of addresses that various organizations return to circulation. They will be distributed in order of priority in /24 blocks.
Who else has addresses?
Three more registrars still have IPv4, but they have been operating in "austerity mode" for the past few years. For example, in Africa AFRINIC introduced limits on the number of issued addresses and strict checks on their intended use. Despite all the measures, experts predict that the IPv4 of the African registrar as early as March 2020. But there is an opinion that this will happen even earlier - in January.
The Latin American LACNIC has few resources left - it distributes the last /8 block. Representatives of the organization say that they issue a maximum of 1024 addresses per company. Wherein block can only those customers who have never received them before. Similar measures were taken in the Asian APNIC. But at the disposal of the organization only a fifth of the /8 pool, which will also be empty in the near future.
Not yet the end
Experts note that it is possible to extend the "lifetime" of IPv4. It is enough to return unclaimed addresses to the common pool. For example, behind the automaker Ford Motor Company and the insurance firm Prudential Securities more than 16 million public IPv4. In a thread on Hacker News that these organizations don't need that many IPs.
At the same time, it is worth issuing returned addresses not in blocks, as before, but in strictly necessary quantities. Other HN Resident that Spectrum/Charter and Verizon providers are already adopting this practice - they issue a single IP from /24 instead of a whole /30 block.
A couple of materials from our blog on HabrΓ©:
/Unsplash/
Another solution to the problem of a lack of addresses can be to buy and sell them at auctions. For example, in 2017 MIT engineers that the university owns 14 million unused IPs - they decided to sell most of them. A similar story happened in early December in Russia. The Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROS) announced the closure of the local Internet registrar LIR. After that he about 490 thousand IPv4 of the Czech company Reliable Communications. Experts estimated the total cost of the pool at $9-12 million.
But if companies start to massively resell IP to each other, to the growth of routing tables. However, there is a solution here too. (Locator/ID Separation Protocol). Here the authors propose to use two addresses when addressing the network. One to identify devices, and the second to create a tunnel between servers. This approach allows you to remove addresses from BGP tables that cannot be combined into one block - as a result, the routing table grows more slowly. LISP support in your solutions companies such as Cisco and LANCOM Systems (developing SD-WAN).
The cardinal solution to the problem with IPv4 will be a massive . But despite the fact that the protocol was developed more than 20 years ago, it has not yet been widely adopted. Currently, 15% of sites support it. Although a number of companies are taking steps to change the situation. So, many Western cloud providers for unused IPv4. At the same time, the addresses involved (connected to the virtual machine) are provided free of charge.
In general, network equipment manufacturers and ISPs are happy to move to IPv6. But they regularly face difficulties during migration. We will prepare a separate material about these difficulties and how to solve them.
What we write about in the VAS Experts corporate blog:
Source: habr.com