Re: [TCLCORE] The Long and Winding Road.. to 8.6.0

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

On 18/03/2010 17:48, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I personally could care less about IPv6, I believe that NAT solves the
> address problem and the world will come to that realization and we'll
> claw back all those class A blocks but whatever.   I just need a tcl
> that works w/ IPv4 on those old platforms.

There was a piece on slashdot a few weeks back IIRC on how the last
major free blocks have been released for handing out, but what that
really depends on where you are in the world, as the major allocations
are done on a continental scale. It's like to be an issue in Asia fairly
soon. Nobody's quite sure how long North America will be OK. Africa has
oodles of space (internet adoption is relatively slow there) and Europe,
despite being short, will last a long time due to the strictness of the
rules in place[*]. While maybe it's not an issue for you, for others it
most certainly is a problem.

For example, at work we have a problem with running out of addresses for
servers *despite* our using NAT a lot. Some of that is due to local
policies to be sure (no, I don't particularly wish to discuss them) but
even so. Now I happen to know that it might be a while before we can
switch to IPv6, but putting off doing anything about the software that
is in use doesn't help. It takes a long time to roll things out into all
the nooks and crannies.

Donal.
[* I think you can't get a anything as large as a class B any more in
Europe. They're just no longer for sale. ]