Imagine if the world ran out of phone numbers. Mobile providers could issue no more smartphones, businesses could create no new call centers, and the public would be left fighting over and recycling a diminishing amount of existing phone numbers. “That’s a similar situation that we’re in on the Internet,” says Facebook’s Donn Lee, pointing out that the Web’s billions of IP addresses are about to hit its max.

Lee is Facebook’s lead engineer on IPv6, or Internet Protocol version 6, the first new version of the Internet’s addressing system in decades, which will provide trillions and trillions more unique addresses on the Web. Every time you go online or print a document at work, you’re essentially dialing a unique number–called an IP address–to communicate with other devices and computer networks. It’s no different than visiting a friend: You might know the name of his apartment building, but you’ll need an address and zip code in order to locate it on a map. The Web works in the same way, but as the number of homes and businesses and devices connected to the Internet continues to increase exponentially, we’re rapidly running out of space online. And now it’s up to Internet giants such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to fix the problem before it’s too late.

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Start with your Internet service provider (ISP).  Although not every ISP currently provides IPv6 service, the list grows in proportion to customer demand

So contact your ISP today or set up an account with a tunnel broker. Ask your CDN about their support plans for IPv6.

http://blogs.cisco.com/borderless/how-to-get-ipv6-now/

Geeksaresexy.net has a very interesting article on the future of v4 space and the possibility of a black market where IPv4 could sell for rates far higher than estimated fee of $1,250 a year for 256 addresses.

Read at source

Source [ www.geeksaresexy.net ]

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has just allocated regional registries RIPE and APNIC a /8 each this month.  For the uninitiated a /8 represents 2 to the power of 24 IP addresses or 167,77,216.

A /8 is the largest block allocation that can be made by IANA and these two have had the effect of bringing forward the x-date, the date for IPv4 exhaustion, by 5 months or so to April 30th 2011.

These blocks are subdivided into smaller subnets for further allocation to ISPs/organisations with smaller requirements  such as BT and Timico. Timico has a variety of block allocations ranging from  /16 to /20’s.

If you want to know more about IP addressing allocations check out wikipedia. The times they are a changing.

source [ trefor.net ]

Following on a very successful event in January 2009 (videos and slides of the sessions are still available), which was supported by funding from the ISOC Community Grants Programme, the Irish National IPv6 Task Force is hosting another all-day summit in Dublin Castle, Ireland on Wednesday, 19 May 2010.

This year’s event is designed to increase awareness amongst both public and private sectors on the merits and issues related to the depletion of the IPv4 address space, and the economic impact this has on the Irish Economy. Discover why it is a matter of necessity for Ireland to embrace the early adoption of IPv6.

The keynote speakers are Brian Carpenter (University of Auckland) and Geoff Huston (APNIC). A distinguished panel of speakers and panellists includes: Dennis Jennings (ICANN), Daniel Karrenberg (ISOC and RIPE), Mat Ford (ISOC). The talks will provide global perspectives on IPv6 adoption and challenges, with some localisation to specific issues in Ireland. Mícheál Ó Foghlú who is Executive Director Research at the TSSG, Waterford IT will chair the event.

This event is supported by the TSSG in Waterford IT, HEAnet, DCENR, Science Foundation Ireland, and the Irish National IPv6 Centre.

For more information about the event, visit the summit website.

For anyone that has a website but your your hosting provider or network provider doesnt support IPv6 but you would like to offer IPv6 connectivity for your visitors.

IPv6Proxy.nloffers you a way to do this.. and its free! Just sign up with your domain name, add AAAA (quad A) records to your DNS server and you are ready to go!

The dutch weblog GeenStijl has IPv6 connectivity while hosting at a network provdider who only has a ipv4 network. Well they use the exact same system, and according to the guys over at Prolocation.net who maintain the Proxy, GeenStijl was the first of many more big sites to come that will run dualstack.

So, if you’ve a website called “www.example.com”, you should add the following DNS entry to the DNS zone of example.com:
“www.example.com AAAA 2a00:d00:ff:131:94:228:131:131″

So visit IPv6Proxy.nl add your domain name and start running your website dualstack!

American Registry for Internet Numbers president expects federal mandate soon for agencies to begin enabling new protocols on public-facing Web servers

The pool of available IPv4 addresses will be completely allocated in the not-too-distant future.

“It will happen 717 days from today, around 2 in the afternoon, just before tea time,” said John Curran, president of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

Or it might be in just 657 days; it depends on whose countdown clock you use. The point is, given the current rate of Internet growth, in about two years all new address assignments will be made with IPv6 addresses.’

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Source [ GCN ]