Bach Seat

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has reported that the IPv4 well is just about dry in North America. On 01 July 2015, ARIN had to refuse a request for a block of IPv4 addresses. The ARIN statement says that there are still a few IPv4 numbers available in smaller block sizes. But for all intents and purposes, there are no more unassigned public IPv4 addresses. As of July 18, 2015, the ARIN IPv4 Deletion page reports only 335 /24 IPv4 address ranges are available. It is time to start looking at IPv6.

The good news, according to FierceEnterpriseCommunications, is the IPv4 drought isn’t yet affecting most of the internal networks of enterprises. But it’s just a matter of time before it starts to have a greater impact on the largest of enterprises. Microsoft (MSFT), for instance, found it was out of IPv4 addresses a few weeks ago. And for the first time in ARIN’s history, they denied a company that requested a large block of IPv4 addresses. Tom Coffeen, chief IPv6 evangelist at Infoblox, in a statement to FierceEnterpriseCommunications explained:

Though the IPv4 well has run dry and threatens service providers, the sky hasn’t yet landed on enterprise networks … Most enterprises still rely on private IPv4 for their internal networks. The small number of public, routable IPv4 addresses required to connect enterprise networks to the Internet is typically provided by the ISP, making IPv4 much more critical for Internet services providers.

One company that is reacting to IPv4 scarcity is Apple (AAPL). Apple’s latest operating systems – iOS 9 for iPhones and iPads and OS X El Capitan for Macs are designed to take advantage of IPv6. The new operating systems select the fastest connection with the lowest latency, whether IPv4 or IPv6, using the Happy Eyeballs algorithm, explained David Schinazi, the CoreOS networking engineer at Apple. Devices use the Happy Eyeballs algorithm to decide which protocol to use, as many applications use a “dual-stack” approach to networking, making available both IPv4 and IPv6 connections.

FierceMobileIT says this worked out to be a 50/50 split between IPv4 and iPv6 in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, but for the new OSes, IPv6 will be chosen by the algorithm around 99 percent of the time, according to Apple beta testing. Apple’s Schinazi wrote in a post on the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list that Apple considers IPv6 mainstream.

IPv6 is now mainstream instead of being an exception, there are less broken IPv6 tunnels, IPv4 carrier-grade NATs [network address translations] are increasing in numbers, and throughput may even be better on average over IPv6

The author reports that testing performed by Apple shows that the new OSes should use IPv6 addresses around 99 percent of the time. Apple operating systems have supported IPv6 by default for Mac users as part of the OS X 10.2 Jaguar release in May 2002.

Mr, Schinazi cautioned that both OSes are in beta so things might change for the final versions. “If this behavior proves successful during the beta period, you should expect more IPv6 traffic from Apple products in the future,” he added.

Related articles

• North America’s IPv4 address supply is running dry (techreport.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.