Today I’m going to summarize a few news items in the IPv6 Flow. The good part is that so much is happening that no one can cover it all. I see more and more IPv6 discussions in mailing lists, hear more about IPv6 when meeting people and get apologies when I ask for IPv6 strategies. We are far from there yet, but things are moving in the right direction. Spend 30 minutes on IPv6 every Friday and start working with the new black – the global Internet Protocol that will survive the growth of the Internet!
Europe: RIPE enters last phase of IPv4 allocations
Last week, RIPE NCC in Europe saw the very bottom of the IPv4 allocation pool. RIPE has no more address for Provider Independent allocations, so enterprises that wants to get a real “private” address space will not get any unless they can get it from 3rd party LIRs that still has a pool available. Each party that is a registred RIPE LIR will get 1.024 addresses and then there’s no more. Finito. Gone. Providers will still have addresses for some time, but be sure that pricing goes up for getting provider dependent addresses. Of course this was big news all over the web:
- Engadget: RIPE NCC handing out its last block of IPv4 addresses, tries to fend off internet survivalism
- Infoworld.com: Scramble for IPv6 begins as Europe depletes IPv4 URLs
- Le Monde: Les stocks d’adresses IP presque épuisés en Europe
- Elektroniktidningen, Sweden: Vägs ände för IPv6 är nådd!
Americas: ARIN enters phase two of the IPv4 countdown plan
ARIN published a statement on Tuesday this week that it has entered phase 2 of the countdown plan. This means that they are preparing to enter the same phase as RIPE NCC and start using more strict routines, improved reviews of address allocation requests and a shorter hold time for address reuse. During phase 3 these procedures will be streamlined for phase 4, which is when they distribute the last available addresses.
IETF: RFC 6724 replaces RFC 3484 – IPv6 address selection
RFC 3484, published in 2003, defines rules for how an application with the help of the operating system finds the proper destination and selects a sender’s address when communicating over IPv6. For an application developer, it’s a very important RFC that now gets an update named RFC 6724. The way we 
use IPv6 and IPv6 in itself has changed since 2003, so this update is very welcome. The site-local-prefix in IPv6 is now deprecated and the way we handle dual stack preferences has changed. RFC 3484 required applications to prefer IPv6 – ALWAYS. With the experiences that lead to World IPv6 day, Happy Eyeballs and the World IPv6 Launch we know better and RFC 6724, edited by Dave Thaler, Microsoft, puts things back on track.
“In dual-stack implementations, the destination address selection algorithm can consider both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses — depending on the available source addresses, the algorithm might prefer IPv6 addresses over IPv4 addresses, or vice versa.”
In a previous article we discussed the implementation of RFC 3484 in various operating systems. It is important for all kind of applications, but specially applications that use protocols like SIP that put IP addresses in the messages and use ICE, which puts all the available IP addresses in a protocol message, both IPv4 and IPv6. The RFC now suggests that managers should be able to change the address selection policy in the O/S – and that the application may set its own preference. This puts even more presser on application developers to do the right thing!
Implementing IPv6 in a platform : Experiences from NG Voice
Carsten Block is a developer of voice platforms for service providers, based on Open Source software. He works with the IMS standards as specified by the 3Gpp consortium. He blogs about his experiences when doing this and how he found himself in between clouds of IPv4-only service providers that wasn’t ready to communicate with him using the new global IP protocol.
“Having IPv6 is great and it is good to know, that we are prepared. But sometimes, you simply have to face the facts… while neither our interconnects speak IPv6 nor any access-network is IPv6, we should probably stick with IPv4, even though it’s again the Hen and the Egg-Problem….”
Cudos to Carsten and NG Voice for taking the first steps and spreading the word! While it’s not easy to be first and find yourself alone, I’m sure that companies do not want to be the last ones in this huge conversion to the new black!
How does the IPv4 address depletion affect the market? Can I get good money by selling my addresses?
While discussing IPv6 many people hint that there are vast quantities of unused IPv4 addresses. Recently there was a lot of discussion about a public department in the UK with 1 million unused addresses. While it is good practise in returning unused IPv4, a million addresses is nothing compared with recent demand for IP addresses. In addition to this, there’s a market for IPv4 addresses. Microsoft recently purchased a large quantity of addresses from Nortel Networks in bankrupcy and the same happened when Borders – a US bookseller – closed their doors. Iljitsch van Beijnum , a well known IPv6 expert and IETF participant, writes about IPv4 trading in Ars Technicha – a good read.
That’s all for today! Have a great IPv6 Friday!
/Olle