[colug-432] The end [of IPv4] is here, sort of

[Rick Hornsby]

"ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, has now activated its "IPv4 Unmet Requests Policy." Until now, organizations in the ARIN region were able to get IPv4 addresses as needed, but yesterday, ARIN was no longer in the position to fulfill qualifying requests. As a result, ISPs that come to ARIN for IPv4 address space have three choices: they can take a smaller block (ARIN currently still has a limited supply of blocks of 512 and 256 addresses), they can go on the wait list in the hopes that a block of the desired size will become available at some point in the future, or they can transfer buy addresses from an organization that has more than it needs."

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/us-exhausts-new-ipv4-addresses-waitlist-begins/

A very large healthcare IT company I no longer work for said (more accurately, the scuttlebutt said) that they would not change to IPv6 in large part because of the complexity, but moreso because our clients (hospitals, etc) were refusing to move to IPv6.

It seems to me that widespread IPv6 adoption will only start to happen once it becomes significantly more expensive for orgs like my former employer to purchase IPv4 blocks than it does to change over.

It is also interesting to me that there doesn't seem to be anything (I saw) in EC2 where IPv6 was enabled out of the cloud box.  Everything is IPv4.  A quick Google search reveals little from Amazon itself, and the official word is that EC2 only supports IPv4 for VPC[1].  (Amazon is pushing everyone from classic toward VPC.)

All this makes me more disappointed I won't be able to attend Jim's proposed talk[2].


-rick

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/elb-internet-facing-load-balancers.html
[2] http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/2015-July/003944.html