No more IP for you

[Paul LeoNerd Evans]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:07:33 +0000
Mike Whitaker <mike at altrion.org> wrote:

> 
> On 20 Jan 2010, at 09:03, Luis Motta Campos wrote:
> 
> > http://www.nro.net/media/less-than-10-percent-ipv4-addresses-remain-unallocated.html
> > 
> > Now, the IP Allocation Market will start warming up... if you're sitting
> > on some IP addresses for several years now, I see big business
> > opportunities for you ahead.
> 
> So, there's still nearly half a billion addresses unallocated?
> 
> Do I /really/ need to worry /just/ yet?

The problem is not so much that there's not many left, but they're split
about in lots of little holes, with no heirarchy and no easy way to know
physically where they are.

A major problem with IPv4 "addressing" is that global IPv4 "addresses"
have become simply names, not addresses. They do not give any information
on where to send the traffic, simply who it is. You need a BGP router
with a full route set to know where to send it. On our border routers
at $company we're currently looking at 305,000 prefixes. Supposing an
absolutely minimal implementation of, say, 5 bytes per prefix (4 address,
pack prefix length and next hop ID in a single byte), that's still 15MB.
More likely it'll take much more space than that.. possibly more than
the, say, 64MB that smaller Cisco routing boxes come with. That's every
internet-BGP-talking box in the world, has to have that table. And it
grows all the time..

-- 
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans

leonerd at leonerd.org.uk
ICQ# 4135350       |  Registered Linux# 179460
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/
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