I have been hearing this end-of-the-IPv4 world chatter for 10+ years now. While I understand it is a real problem, I wonder if we’ll still be talking about it in the present tense 10 years from now.
It might seem like it makes more sense to switch to IPv6 than to deal with the issues of IPv4, but the entities that have to deal with problems that result from IPv4 depletion usually aren't the same entities impeding the adoption of IPv6.
a) struggling to implement proper IP based access control with their available address space.
b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around.
I mostly agree, but this overstates thing some. 10/8 offers 24 bits, 192.168 offers 16 bits, and 172.16-172.31 offers 20 bits.
The latter are particularly frequently unused; if you pick one of 172.20-172.28 to cram into you have a high chance of not crashing into someone else when you integrate networks. Particularly if you use the upper half of the resultant class b.
Of course RFC 4193 for IPv6 is very nice; pick your own random 40 bit prefix, and get to run 65536 subnets of arbitrary size. You need to integrate ~2^20-- a million-- networks before you have a 50% chance of having encountered a collision.
haha, I wish. We decided to use them two decades ago exactly because we thought they were less frequently used, but then a decade later docker comes along and uses exactly that as a default NAT subnet. So we get multiple tickets about that a week.
"we recently set up service x, and it seems to be working fine. However, when we try to connect from the campus wifi, or a certain department, the service does not respond".
What happens is the server gets a request from a private IP within the range assigned to docker0, and then the container replies, but because the IP is believed to be local, linux correctly tries to find something attached to the docker0 interface with that IP and fails.
No, we're not out of oil or IPv4 addresses. It's just getting a lot harder to come by either one, and the writing's on the wall that the invisible hand is able to slap us silly if we don't seriously start migrating to the replacements ASAP.
IPv6 lets us build in the sky, where space is no longer a constraint.
In any case, many of those "wasted" /8s have been resold for $100M+ in the last decade. Grep this page for "formerly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
Before IANA runout in 2011 we were going through one /8 every month; given that demand has only gone up since then, 20 /8s would be, what, a 12 month supply or so? v4 is just too small, and no amount of pushing allocations around is going to change that.
Does the UK Ministry of Defense actually have 16 million devices that need publicly routable addresses? Or could they be doing what almost everyone else is doing and using a handful of publicly routable addresses and private IP ranges behind them?
It would take them years to renumber off of their /8, at great cost and with the result of an increased ongoing operational cost, and for what benefit? That /8 would last the public internet for less than a month. It's not like the people who are yet to deploy v6 are suffering a lack of time, so buying them an extra month which they would then squander isn't going to be very helpful.
It would be more accurate to say one continent has run out of IPv4 addresses, but even that isn't entirely accurate. As IPv4 addresses have become scarcer and scarcer, it's become common for companies to obtain IP addresses from registries other than the one that handles their region.
In other words: RIPE is in charge of assigning IP addresses. They're running out of IPv4 addresses to assign to other organizations. That's different from a single company running out of IPv4 addresses, which just means they need to buy more addresses (or find an alternative solution).