IPAM

On this second anniversary of World IPv6 Launch, are you among the growing population of those having deployed IPv6? The World IPv6 Launch site has a nice infographic to commemorate the anniversary which indicates growing IPv6 momentum. The Internet Society links to several measurement sites, many of which indicate an increasing volume of IPv6 traffic. Whether you have already deployed IPv6 or you have no plans at all, you are invited to complete our annual IPv6 survey . This year's survey is very similar to last and prior years' surveys in order to help us identify trends and changing perceptions about IPv6. The survey should take about five minutes to complete so we invite you to let us know what you think. We're also going to be drawing the name of one survey respondent to whom we will award a $100 Visa gift card, so I invite you to complete the survey.

As I pondered my prior post regarding ARIN's announcement of its IPv4 address capacity dwindling down to a single /8, I began to wonder how long it would be before those supporting only IPv4 communications would feel the impact. The "impact" of ignoring IPv6 may be the inability to communicate with THE growth segment of the Internet. Once IPv4 is totally depleted, ALL growth will by necessity utilize IPv6. And this total depletion time may come very soon. As I pointed out in that post, the sum total IPv4 address space that's available globally is about 0.1 billion. Truthfully, ISPs that obtain space from RIRs and enterprises from ISPs, likewise have their own stock of IPv4 capacity, but once the RIRs run out, there will be no additional space to be had. Consider that the 0.1 billion IP addresses represents a mere 1.4% of the world's population of 7.2 billion. One simple minded conclusion would be that the IPv4 Internet can support a mere 1.4% increase in Interne...

ARIN today announced that it is now down to its last /8 of IPv4 address space. This is the point when remaining IPv4 capacity is considered "depleted" and more stringent allocation policies are put into effect, as outlined in the announcement. The analogous depletion state was announced and similar policies enforced by APNIC in 2011 and by RIPE in 2012. LACNIC crossed the /8 threshold in 2011 but will engage its depletion policies when it reaches one /11 (2.1M IP addresses). The last /8 threshold means the RIR has about 16.8 million IPv4 addresses available, which may seem like a lot, but each allocation consists of hundreds if not thousands of IP addresses to ISPs and customers. Hence the more stringent allocation policies to extend the lifetime of IPv4 a bit longer. You can follow the current outlook on IPv4 lifetime by RIR on Geoff Huston's potaroo site and summarized below and updated with this recent ARIN information: RIR Projected Exhaustion Date Remaining /8s ...

Upon hearing the news that Google’s measurement of IPv6 users hitting their websites hit 3% of total users, having just surpassed 2% in September, 2013, I became less skeptical of the exponential growth predictions for IPv6. Under the assumption that people around the world use google and it is atop Alexa’s list of top websites, it would seem such a measurement provides data that could be loosely projected to the Internet at large. To explore this uptick in hits, I sampled some data points from Google’s statistics site in an attempt to create a future projection. Figure 1: A pair of curve fittings for Google IPv6 users data In my first attempt at “curve fitting,” I considered quarterly data points going back to early 2009 when google started measuring IPv6 visitors. Applying curve fitting to these data points, I created the the chart of Figure 1, with sample data points represented as blue diamonds. Applying an exponential curve to this data set yields the more gradually slopin...

In the six weeks since I blogged about the emergence of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) in the root zone, eighty-four new gTLDs have been delegated. This brings the total number of TLDs, including country code TLDs (ccTLDs) to 427. Of the recently added eight-four gTLDs, nine are internationalized, and this brings us to fifty internationalized TLDs, comprising a mix of both gTLDs and ccTLDs. And thanks to the signing requirement of the new gTLD program, all eighty-four domains are signed with DNSSEC. This brings the number of signed TLDs to 235, with 229 having delegation signer (DS) records in the root zone. Signed TLDs under which you register domain names, especially those with DS records in the root zone, streamline the process for resolvers to validate your signed name space. Resolvers need only maintain the root zone public key (trust anchor) to validate signed subtrees of the global DNS namespace. As long as each domain along this chain down to your zone is signed, a r...

Since the inaugural set of four new generic top level domains (gTLDs) was announced six weeks ago, the tally of new gTLDs has grown to 35. And the number of new gTLDs will likely continue to grow well into the hundreds during 2014 as respective domain applicants work through the approval process. Even today, the 35 newly delegated TLDs comprise just over 10% of the 343 TLDs in the Internet root zone. The table below summarizes the status of the today's TLDs by type (country code, generic, etc.), whether internationalized or not, and whether DNSSEC-signed or not. Starting at the bottom of the table, of the three generic-restricted TLDs, .biz, .name and .pro, only .biz is signed and clearly none of them are internationalized. The .arpa infrastructure domain is signed as well. None of the so-called sponsored TLDs are internationalized and about half are signed. All of the generic TLDs are signed, and the 35 new gTLDs fall within this row. In fact, all new gTLDs must be signed as ...

There's much to consider when developing an IPv6 address plan. Such a plan defines how you intend to allocate subnets from the IPv6 block you received from your ISP or Internet Registry. The first step entails defining how much address space is required across and into the depths of your IP network to provide IPv6 address capacity for those devices requiring it. You can use your current IPv4 address allocation database as a guide to define the active utilization of your IPv4 address space and should provide a solid basis for IPv6 capacity needs barring new network initiatives that increase address space usage. Once you've defined where in your network you require IPv6 addresses and how much , you should consider how to perform your allocations. One approach is to simply allocate all required /64 subnets directly from your base ISP allocation, using a monotonic, sparse, best-fit or random allocation approach. This single-tier allocation approach may work fine for small network...