Seven years ago, the RIPE NCC, which serves Europe, the middle east and the former Soviet Union, was no longer able to give out IPv4 address space to ISPs and other networks as needed. From that point on, the "last /8" policy came into effect, which meant that each "RIPE member" or local internet registry (LIR) could get one last IPv4 /22 (block of 1024 addresses). It very much looks like that last bit of IPv4 address space will run out before the end of the year.
Right before the final /8 policy came into effect, the RIPE NCC was giving out about a million IPv4 addresses per week. In 2019, they gave out a million IPv4 addresses every three months in the form of those final /22s. And now it's a million IPv4 addresses every six weeks, with two million left to go. Apparently, many new LIRs are set up to get one of those /22s while they last.
latest version of this image on the RIPE website
So in all likelihood RIPE will move from the final /8 policy to a new policy, where LIRs are put on a waiting list and get a /24 as those become available, before the end of 2019.
Permalink - posted 2019-09-09
Less than three months ago I wrote about how the uptake of the remaining IPv4 addresses at RIPE was accelerating, with the RIPE NCC likely to run out of the addresses set aside in the "last /8" before the end of the year. And so they did, two days ago. So as of this week, it's no longer possible to request address space in the RIPE service region (Europe, former Soviet Union, Middle East) and get them within a somewhat predictable period...
Read the article - posted 2019-11-27
There are some advantages to filtering out packets with invalid addresses in them. That would be a packet with a private source or destination address, for instance. Those never have any business traveling across the internet. (Not to be confused with BCP 38 filtering.) For instance, there have been instances where spammers grab an unused prefix, start announcing it in BGP, do a spam run and then drop the prefix. When packets with private addresses enter your network, bad things may happen if you use those addresses yourself. And these invalid "martian" packets are just an annoyance, using up traffic and generating log entries.
Read the article - posted 2019-11-28
Another month, and we'll be living in the 2020s. And yet, 70% of the internet is still IPv4-only. (I'll be writing a story looking back on IPv6 progress the past decade in January.) So I thought: maybe I should draw a line in the sand and turn off IPv4 for my website. But then how will those 70% find me, and all the links to older content will be dead to much of the internet. Click below to continue reading.
