[arin-ppml] Change of Use and ARIN (was: Re: AFRINIC And The Stability Of The Internet Number Registry System)

[Michel Py]

> Joe Maimon wrote :
> The invisible hand has its middle finger extended, telling you and those like you what many have
> been saying for years unto deaf ears. IPv6 and its migration have been and continue to be an
> utter disaster, created purely out of ivory tower hubris that designed it to be an incompatible
> dual stack dual cost useless investment for most of the actual users of the network.

I have pointed that out many times publicly.
Actually, I don't even extend the middle finger. I just vote with my wallet.
I'm not one of the "haves". I do not have a legacy Class A or Class B for use or sale.

> And it was easily predictable.

There is a time factor in this.
I was once a strong supporter of IPv6, but at some point I became pragmatic. I was once a member of the cult. I spread the FUD.
20 or 25 years ago, it was acceptable to be young and stupid and believe in it. 20 or 25 years later, I am not as young as I was 25 years earlier; I may not be smarter either, but I have learned a few things.


> Paul E McNary wrote :
> We are out of ipv4 IP's.

No. _you_ are out. I hate to break it to you, but the world does not care. Worse, the part of the world that has a fat checkbook (the "haves", as often referred to) does care : they like it just the way it is.
IPv4 shortage is not a problem, it's a blessing. The "haves" have been stockpiling it for the last 20 years. Thanks to the FUD.

Buy^H^H^Htransfer them while you still can afford it. In the big scheme of things, $50 per IP one-time is not cheap but not that bad yet.
I'm relocating a datacenter these days. Months of prep work, I can't share the budget publicly but let me tell you this : I made my company "transfer" a /24 a few months ago, at $30 per IP. If I had to do that today, it would be $50 per IP and that would still be a no-brainer.

At home, my residential ISP charges me $40/mo for a static IP. Fourty freakin' bucks a MONTH for a freakin' DHCP reservation one-time and not even a written promise of no GC-NAT. I want one because I'm a bearded geek.
At $1000 per IP, it will still sell.

Owen hates me for that presentation I made years ago. The StarWars scroll, the music, running PowerPoint on windoze laptop.


> Ronald F. Guilmette wrote :
> If you think that we've run out of IPv4 addresses, talk to the U.S. DoD which just re-routed 175 million
> of their 221,971,968 IPv4 addresses, just to use them as one colossal and record-shattering honeypot.

I suppose you are referring to GRS-DoD, AS8003. Heck, I would like to have it for the exact same purpose.
The hard truth is, they can't return it to the free pool. Or sell it, does not matter. Everyone uses the DoD space you are referring to as RFC-1918-ter, everyone knows it, everyone does it. The DoD people have been caught between the rock and the hard place; fortunately, they do not need a billion+ US dollars to sell their legacy IPv4 space, as their budget with associated ORGs is a trillion dollar per year.

Some people would buy a chunk of 30/8 or any of the other legacy DoD Class A, not me. This address space has been hijacked in so many private networks that it is not fit to be publicly routable for a decade.
The only way out of it would be to give the few large ORGs who need it bigger than the 10/8 network they officially have : the 240/4 space.
Unfortunately, all of the efforts to release Class E to private unicast have been torpedoed for ages by IPv6 zealots.

Their use of their experiment as a honeypot will not last forever; there is a finite number of legacy class A to blacklist as being the DoD honeypot, in a short period of time all the "up-to-date" zombie bot armies will get updated not to hit these, and shortly after that all that their honeypot is going to catch is some desperate folk over a 14.4 modem in the boondocks doing a copy/paste of (being careful now) the widow of some $afrinic_country $head_of_state insisting of transferring $big_bucks to your checking account.

I'm sorry to say it but here it is : even if DoD released several hundred millions of IPv4 addresses, it would not change a darn thing.
There is just not enough space in 32 bits for the world to do without GCNAT. There is just not enough money for the world to dual-stack for 30 years or more (we are passed 20 years already).
The balkanization of the Internet has already happened. I have been publicly voicing my concerns about it for ages.

Michel.