IP4 Space

Doug Barton dougb at dougbarton.us
Mon Mar 29 23:17:28 UTC 2010


On 03/26/10 14:25, Lamar Owen wrote:
> While my hypothetical answer was intentionally worst-case, with just-barely-
> too-old hypothetical hardware being mentioned, in reality my situation is 
> dealing with in some cases much older equipment.  I could go into detail, but 
> you guys don't want to read my pity party, I'm sure.  

I understand what you're saying, and I "get" the issue of not being able
to upgrade legacy equipment in the current economic client.

However, none of that is relevant to the fact that a change IS coming,
whether you're ready for it or not. The questions are, what will the
change(s) be, how soon, and how will it/they affect me?

If your network doesn't change much at all chances are you may never
need to request more IPv4 space, so the coming events won't affect you
at all, keep doing what you're doing.

If your network does have a "moderate" need for more IPv4 space in the
future you may be able to get away with shuffling some things around,
being more stringent about putting internal-only resources on RFC 1918
space, etc. Costs here are minimal, but as you pointed out "time is
money" so they are not free. However, overall impact is negligible.

However, if your network is growing, or can be anticipated to grow in
the next 5 years, here is where the pain starts. You may not be able to
get IPv4 space when you need it, so the only options available to you
are some form of NAT, or IPv6. Neither cost is trivial in terms of
equipment and deployment time. Both have tradeoffs.

So the question is not, "Can I afford to make a change?" The questions
are as above, what, and how soon? This is why "we" have been telling
people for years to work IPv6 requirements into all NEW stuff
(networking hardware, end-user systems, b/w contracts) so that WHEN the
changes start to affect you you won't have to do a forklift upgrade.


Doug

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