On Sun, 7 May 2006, Jamie Baddeley wrote:
On Sun, 2006-05-07 at 17:02 +1200, barry(a)unix.co.nz wrote:
But yeah IPv6 is just around the corner.
http://www.potaroo.net/ispcolumn/2003-07-v4-address-lifetime/ale.html
Given that it's 15-20 years before the sky falls roughly speaking, and we've had IPv4 for about the same amount of time, I think it's a fairly stunning achievement for a technology to have a lifetime of 40-50 years.
A dynamicly updated version is here (the version above is 3 years old): http://bgp.potaroo.net/ipv4/ "The date predicted by this model where the IPv4 unallocated address pool will be exhausted is 09-Sep-2011. A related prediction is the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 unallocated address pool, which this model predicts will occur in 27-Aug-2012. " The article says a lot more than that. I think the big thing is that as the cost of IPv4 stacks falls the demand for IPv4 addresses will increase to a point that the current allocation policy can not sustain. This will result in a lot of NAT, a move to IPv6 or a combination of both. For example, here is an interesting wee talk about the $100 laptop project that mentions at the end that one problem they may have is find the IP addresses to put 10 million laptops all running mesh networking on. http://www.linux-pm.org/docs/pm-summit-0406-olpc.pdf -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.