IPAM

Starting today, ICANN-accredited registrars may submit Delegation Signer (DS) records to Verisign, the .com administrator. Most organizations obtain and register their domain names with domain registrars, who may also be their ISP. Contact your registrar to determine if they are participating in this process. Verisign will include submitted DS records in a"deliberately unvalidatable" .com zone that will be published on Monday, February 28. This deliberately unvalidatable zone will contain dummy keys for testing purposes. As recently announced , the .com zone will be signed in production on March 31, 2011. The submitted DS records will be included in the signed .com zone and the .com DS record will be published in the root zone, fully linking the chain of trust for .com zones! This linked chain of trust vastly simplifies the management of trusted keys on validating resolvers (typically within recursive or caching DNS servers which are queried by clients or "stub resol...

With the recent announcement that IANA has allocated its last remaining IPv4 address space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), time is running out on availability of new IPv4 address space allocations. As the last remaining IPv4 address space is allocated, enterprises at some point in the not too distant future will have no choice but to implement IPv6 for Internet-accessible web or email servers. Any newly-formed organization or those that require additional address space after this time will be "IPv6-only" organizations. Perhaps you're thinking this is not an issue given the plentiful private IPv4 address space. But consider this: as this population of IPv6-only organizations and users grows into 2013 and beyond, will they be able to reach your websites and email? To serve this population which will grow rapidly as more IP-based public and private applications are deployed, implementation of IPv6-addressable Internet servers is imperative. Besides implementi...

I couldn't agree more! It's nice to see corroboration in recent commentary by Jeff Doyle on the overall disciplined approach for IPAM encompassing IP planning, DHCP and DNS. In his article for Network World, Jeff states that an IPAM solution is even more necessary with the advent (or onslaught?) of IPv6 deployment. Dotted decimal IPv4 address allocations and assignments can more easily be tracked in spreadsheets or homegrown solutions than can IPv6 hexadecimal. In addition, Jeff highlights the need to integrate DHCP and DNS management with IP address planning, which I've always contended helps eliminate duplicate entry of common data, saving time and reducing the potential for data entry errors. Another comment I found interesting is Jeff's contention that some organizations will conclude that managing two protocols, IPv4 and IPv6, is expensive, risky and difficult and will fully implement IPv6 sooner rather than later. If this prediction holds true, then the need ...

Now that IANA has exhausted its IPv4 address space, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) now has a finite amount of IPv4 space to allocate to its “customers”, Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Eventually RIRs will run out of IPv4 space to allocate, followed by an ISP near you. The potaroo site, famous for its predictive tracking of the exhaustion of IPv4 space over the last few years, has published a frequency distribution for each RIR indicating for the estimated probability of IPv4 exhaustion by time frame. This chart indicates that the Asia Pacific region will likely be the first to face exhaustion at the RIR level. The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) appears to be likely to exhaust its IPv4 space before the end of this year! According to the chart, the European region served by the RIPE NCC will exhaust in about a year or so, followed by North America’s ARIN RIR, exhausting in about one and a half to two years. The Latin America and Africa regions, served by ...

As of today, IANA has allocated two /8 IPv4 blocks to APNIC, leaving five remaining /8 blocks. As discussed in a prior post , IANA will now allocate the remaining five /8 blocks, one each to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). IANA's IPv4 address space has been exhausted! Each of the RIRs now has finite and fixed IPv4 address space for allocation to ISPs. This may take a few months but soon the RIRs will exhaust followed by exhaustion of IPv4 space available to end users. The time to start learning and planning for IPv6 is now! The timing is perfect given my talk today at Cisco Live! in London regarding IPAM. I will raise major news and reinforce my recommendation to start the process today!