IETF Provides New Guidance on IPv6 End-Site Addressing

I’ve always been at odds with the recommendation in RFC 3177 towards allocating /48 IPv6 prefixes to end-sites.  To me this seemed rather short-sighted, akin to saying that 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.  It’s essentially equivalent to giving out /12s in the IPv4 world which in this day and age might seem completely ridiculous, but let us not forget that in the early days of IPv4 it wasn’t uncommon to get a /16 or even a /8 in some cases.

Granted, I know there are quite a few more usable bits in IPv6 than there are in IPv4, but allocating huge swaths of address space simply because it’s there and we haven’t thought of all the myriad ways it could be used in the future just seems outright wasteful. Continue reading “IETF Provides New Guidance on IPv6 End-Site Addressing”

IPv4 Address Exhaustion Causing Harmful Effects on the Earth

Today, I received a very disturbing email on NANOG which was forwarded from a recipient on the Global Environment Watch (GEW) mailing list.  If this is true, we all need to take steps to make an orderly and smooth transition to IPv6 as quickly as possible, lest we suffer from the harmful effects described in this email.


From: Stephen H. Inden
To: Global Environment Watch (GEW) mailing list
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 00:19:08 +0200
Subject: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Effects on the Earth

At a ceremony held on February 3, 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining last five /8s of IPv4 address space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). With this action, the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was completely depleted. Continue reading “IPv4 Address Exhaustion Causing Harmful Effects on the Earth”