Start accepting longer prefixes as IPv4 depletes?

Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada.com
Wed Dec 8 22:06:59 UTC 2010


On 8 dec 2010, at 19:59, Matthew Petach wrote:

> Just because we've been treading water as fast as possible to try to stay
> above the drowing point in small prefix ranges does *not* mean we have
> extra headroom to waste on even smaller ranges.

It's not the size of the prefixes that's the problem, but their number. I'm working under the assumption that the new /28s (or whatever) will appear where /24s would have appeared in earlier years. We can think of several measures to limit the numbers of these small blocks, like only allowing one per AS number, or even limiting the number that the RIRs get to give out each year.

Remember there's about 10 times as many prefixes as ASes, having one prefix for each of the 5000 new ASes that are given out each year is NOT the problem. It's the fact that existing ASes increase their prefix load year over year.

> Just move to v6, already.  v4 is done.  trying to keep it on life support
> is going to cost everyone time, money, and reduced life span due to
> increased stress.

There won't be addresses to number new ISP customers in IPv4 anyomore pretty soon.

But content doesn't need many addresses, especially if we get rid of artificial barriers like "you need 256 addresses to play". Eyeballs on v6 and content on v4 is workable, the other way around isn't.

> and use a rent-a-block of v4 space from an
> upstream to host a 4-to-6 proxy box to allow legacy v4 users to reach
> your content.

You can't do this in a protocol agnostic way. You need to go in at layer 7 to make this work. 6 clients to 4 servers can be done with something that isn't much worse than regular NAT.



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