Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion

Wed Jun 18 00:46:30 UTC 2014

On Jun 17, 2014, at 16:07 , Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jared Mauch" <jared at puck.nether.net>
> 
>> It does ring a bit hollow that these sites haven't gotten there when
>> others (Google, Facebook) have already shown you can publish AAAA
>> records with no adverse public impact. 
> 
> "no" adverse impact?
> 
> Seems to me I've seen a few threads go by the last few years that suggested
> that there were a few pathological cases where having the 4A record was 
> worse than not...

Yes, currently less than 0.05% of end users and usually because they have misconfigured systems that think they have IPv6 access when they really don't.

One could make a valid argument that this is no worse than systems with misconfigured IPv4 who cannot reach Google at all even if they don't publish AAAA records because their IPv4 is so badly misconfigured that it doesn't work either. I suspect it may well be approximately the same fraction of systems, though it may take longer to notice/resolve the IPv6 issues than the IPv4 ones.

Owen