Becoming a Protocol Know-It-All
How Addresses Are Assigned
Most IP address conversations usually produce one common question, “Where do I get an IP address from?” The short answer: “From your Internet provider.” But there is more to it. There are several governing bodies that keep track of and allocate IP addresses.
Your internet service provider (ISP) has a pool of addresses it gives users. It, in turn, gets its address from a regional provider (known in the United States as the American Registry of Internet Numbers, or ARIN).
When an ISP requests IP addresses, a form must be filled out describing how many addresses are needed and detailed information is provided to justify the need. ARIN doesn’t just hand out addresses recklessly. They are a precious resource right now.
Once justification is determined, the minimum number of addresses required to achieve the ISP’s goals are allocated, and invoices are paid. Globally, the planet’s IP resources are monitored and allocated to the regional registrars by another group, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). It also handles the root domain name servers (DNS).
IPv6 Addresses Address Shortage
There is a worldwide shortage of useable IPv4 (the protocol we use today) addresses. Thanks to the explosion of the Internet and massive adoption of networking technologies across all industries, we are running out of those addresses.
It’s not that IPv4 was created with a small number of addresses. The problem is the first allocations of those addresses back in the 1980s was extremely inefficient, and big corporations that bought the first blocks are sitting on hundreds of thousands of addresses they will never use. In fact, ARIN has a program to develop a fund to buy back allocated addresses if/when the current IP store reaches a certain critical point.
The one bright spot on the horizon is the next technological leap for IP addressing – IP version 6. IPv6 is a whole new structure of addresses. It does not use four octets like IPv4, and in fact the numbers are written in hexadecimal numbering, not decimal digits. The addresses are a whole lot bigger, too.
“The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2128 (about 3.4 X 1038) addresses – or approximately 5 X 1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5 X 109) people alive in 2006” (Wikipedia). A typical IPv6 address looks like: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
The major obstacle to IPv6 implementation is sort of a catch-22 situation. The provider’s don’t want to switch all their equipment over to support IPv6 because nobody is using it, and nobody is using it because the providers aren’t providing it.
As with many other technological advancements, this is a uniquely American problem. IPv6 is in widespread use elsewhere in the world. We will see its inevitable adoption, probably when the shortage of IPv4 blocks reaches a critical point. In other words, when it’s too late.
MCSE- and CCNA-certified Steve Payne has 15 years of industry experience, presently serving as a network/security system sales engineer and trainer for War
ren Associates.
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