IPv6: Opinions and readiness - The end of the Internet is nigh

[RecQuery]

This seems like the best place to post this, General will probably wonder what the hell I'm talking about and it doesn't seem PC & Console Gaming related.

Okay kind of sensational but that seems like the only way I get people to pay attention to it - With there being about 103 days of global IP addresses left, some regional country authorities have about a years worth left, but that will decrease rapidly as other authorities try to buy them. [1,2,]

I'm just wonder what everyones opinion of IPv6 is, if you've done any deployments yet and if your workplace, if applicable is ready for it. I'm kind of an IPv6 fanboy, it being my honours project topic. My own VPS has been running it for a few years (HTTP, DNS and E-mail) and my ISP (AAISP) has supported it for a while.

[1] - IPv4 exhaustion countdown and report (http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html)
[2] - http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/

[emb123]

I knew this was looming, but didn't realise that crunch time was so close. It's been largely ignored by hardware manufacturers and techie blogs alike on a 'head in the sand' basis.

Boy is this going to put a cat among the pigeons!!

I imagine that it will be panic stations later in the year and a refusal to enforce an immediate switchover to IPv6 to give everyone time to wake up and update existing hardware/firmware or purchase new compatible hardware, so fixed IPv4 addresses are likely to become saleable commodities for a while.

Like most people however, I've barely even looked into this field, so as you've spent some considerable time using and studying IPv6, please share your thoughts and insights.... :)

[RecQuery]

Well I was hoping to avoid giving any extended information until I saw what people thought, but anyway:

It was close to exhaustion two years ago, back then about 14% of IPv4 addresses were reserved but the RIR and IANA released what they could and that bought a few years. Now we're down to 4% reserved which can't really be released this time for obvious technical reasons.

There is some talk among the reticent of reclaiming IP addresses, for example some US universities have entire /8 blocks allocated to them. If that was done it wouldn't buy a lot of time and even if the unversities went along with it, the effort required to aggregate and renumber those ranges is more than the effort required to implement IPv6.

Another solution floated by these people is carrier grade NAT, meaning each connection with go through at least two layers of NAT. NAT was a quick hack implemented in the 90's when this issue first rear it's head. It's not a solution, one layer of NAT is bad enough. It causes so many problems, gamers hate NAT it requires stuff to be proxied and increases latency. It screws up VoIP. People think NAT is secure it's not it gives someone a false sense of security, it's ridiculously easy to punch through NAT. IPv6 gives the option of each address being public routable it doesn't have to be the case.

When the IPv4 address space does run out the Internet won't stop running or anything, it just won't be able to expand beyond that point, that means no new broadband customers, no new mobile devices etc. We'll probably dual stack for a while, I think that's a bad idea but inevitable.

Going to stop at this point, lots of things I haven't tackled but I don't want to write a book, if there are any questions, I'm quite happy to answer them.

EDIT: Removed stuff about consumer routers, IPv6 technical advantages and UK ISPs, the post was becoming unwieldy.