At what point will you be forced to move to IPv6 because of IPv4 address depletion?

Cromulent · 26 Feb 2022 at 04:10

I'm curious how people are planning/dealing with this specific issue. I mean, we've known this is going to happen for years, but there seems to be a distinct case of "I don't care" from UK ISPs.

I'm building a networking service, and there is no way I can get as many IPv4 addresses as I need. They just don't exist. On the other hand, I could get a /48 or even a /32 of IPv6 and be sorted forever. If I started as being IPv6 only, things would be easier down the road. So I was wondering what everyone was planning on doing when the day finally arrives that no matter what, you'll have to move to IPv6?

Cromulent · 26 Feb 2022 at 12:35

SupraWez said:
NAT and PAT slowed down the need for IPv6

Using a NAT is a pretty big kludge though. Especially CGNAT.

Cromulent · 26 Feb 2022 at 15:09

SupraWez said:
Why is it a kludge?

You have the private ranges for all your personal / internal infra needs, more than enough address space, you certainly do not need public addressing on everything, for a start it would be a huge security headache and completely unnecessary.

Why would I need NAT for private addresses? You can use the 10.0.0.0 /8 IPv4 range which is reserved for private usage. I'm talking about IP addresses that are meant to be public.

Cromulent · 28 Feb 2022 at 07:30

Hmm. Thank you all for the replies. First of all, if you have any must-read computer networking books that you can recommend, then I'd be happy to pick them up.

Right, now, that is out of the way. I'll explain what I have in mind. Without giving too much away, it is basically a multilayered caching service for certain data types. If the central server goes down, it will have been automatically cached by previous visitors to the data. So it will basically work like an anycast network mixed in with a more dynamic approach to DNS that allows switching IP addresses for certain resources to change extremely quickly when a certain error or warning state is active.

So if you visited the data in question, you'd become both a client and a server for that data, and other people can access your cached version of the data if the main data goes away. Anyone visiting the data on your machine then caches it, and then they are a client and server as well. In effect, governments and other hostile threats would become impossible to take that data offline as the more popular something gets, the more it spreads and the more people serving the data increases.

Cromulent · 28 Feb 2022 at 09:30

Si. said:
That sounds just like a torrent service to me. Good luck with it, but sorry to say that’s a service I would avoid at all costs, I don’t want my local computer and internet service being used to host websites for others.

Somewhat like a torrent, I guess. At the moment it doesn't really matter what people think as I haven't started doing any programming yet

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