Unusable IP Address Space

That’s a LOT of IP addresses unavailable for all our favorite Internet uses.

The Solution(s)

There are two major solutions to the problem:

  • Private Addresses
  • Migrate to IPv6

Solution #1:  The Private Address Solution

This is the solution described in RFC 1918 – Address Allocation for Private Internets, and this solution is why we still have an estimated 2 more years before we run out.  RFC stands for “Request For Comments” and RFC’s are the documents that become standards that describe how the Internet should work.  RFC 1918 was published to fix and work around problems in the Internet that led to an explosion of routes and the depletion of IP addresses.  RFC 1918 was published in 1996, which is just about when InetDaemon got into the Internet biz.

This problem is sooo last century, but it’s still with us.

The problem of IP address exhaustion has been temporarily patched by using the RFC 1918 private address workaround. Using a special device such as a firewall or router on the Internet side of a network, it is possible to use one IP address to represent thousands of computers using private IP addresses.

The firewalls on the outside, connected to the Internet, track the use of the private IP addresses on the inside of their own networks and hide private addresses from the Internet side.  This allows the systems on both sides to communicate because the connection is managed between the firewall devices at either end.  This process of translating and hiding private addresses behind a single public address is called Network Address Translation with Overload and it is something firewalls have been able to do for more than a decade.

This IP addresses translation process works great so long as everyone uses private address space behind just one or two public IP addresses.  Theoretically, we can expand the Internet almost forever using this scheme, but not everybody understands how to use Private Address space and not everyone knows how to configure NAT.  Still others have special services that require more public IP addresses such as websites and web caching farms.  Google uses a lot of public IP addresses simply because they have so much traffic coming and going that it takes a large army of computers to handle the load, so they use up a lot of IP addresses.

Eventually, even this network address translation solution won’t work any more.

Solution #2:  IP verson 6

IPv6 addresses look something like this:

2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:0000:0000:abcd:ef12

Yes, that address is in hexadecimal and it’s looonggg–128 bits.  That’s much longer than the IPv4 addresses (32 bits), and that’s entirely the point. There should be enough Global Unicast addresses in the IPv6 address space to supply the entire planet for the foreseeable future.

So, why haven’t we moved to it already?

Does your computer support IPv6? Do you even know how to find out?

The largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have already switched to IPv6 and are just letting the rest of us be lazy and limp along until it’s time to make the switch.  Changing to IPv6 will require upgraded computer hardware and software, upgraded network equipment and so on. Upgrading to IPv6 will cost money and take a lot of time and effort and the upgrades will break a lot of things that depend upon, and can’t be upgraded from, the old IPv4.  Many system administrators and CIO’s are dreading the transition and what it will mean.  Meanwhile, they quietly make the upgrades they can while they’re still running IPv4 and retire older legacy applications and tools that don’t support IPv6.   There’s still time to make the switch and nobody’s in a hurry, but the time remaining, and the IP addresses space remaining are both dwindling fast.

Learn More:  Internet Protocol

  1. Internet Protocol
  2. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4)
  3. IP addresses
  4. Private IP Addresses
  5. IP Address Exhaustion
  6. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

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