[CLUE-Tech] Buying an IP.

[David Anselmi]

Thanks for the answers, everyone, very interesting.

Nate Duehr wrote:
> On Friday 19 December 2003 09:02 pm, Jim Ockers wrote:
> 
>>Due to the size of the global routing table ARIN no longer gives out
>>/24 blocks.  The only way you can get a /24 anymore is to get it from
>>someone who already has it, or from someone who has a larger block
>>and can allocate a portion of it to you.

They'll give out /20s (to ISPs) and perhaps smaller to end users, if you 
can justify it.  I heard a talk where a university needed to block 
traffic to one IP.  But they couldn't do it with BGP (which would have 
blocked the traffic at the source) because of routing table sizes.

[...]

> Only the oldest players on the Internet own their own IP space anymore, 
> basically.
> 
> Also, look carefully at ARIN's pricing... you may not want to pay for 
> that /21 if you somehow managed to lie, cheat, and steal (GRIN) to get 
> it.  :-)  They're not cheap.

Well, $2500/yr isn't the end of the world.  Interesting that in IPv6 you 
can get a /32 for $2500/yr.  But not if you're an end user and you have 
to dole out 200 /48s in the first 2 years.  And your $2500/yr is a 
"license fee" so your addresses may be changed (or revoked) at someone's 
whim (ARIN's?  I'm not sure).  Certainly not a big deal practically, but 
something to note for super-paranoid libertarian types.

So if a /32 costs $2500/yr then a /48 should cost 3.8 cents/yr (plus 
administrative overhead so something like the same as you pay for your 
domain name).  Or perhaps so much less than your bandwidth costs that 
every Internet connection comes with at least a /48 (that's globally 
routable addresses).  Be interesting to see if the providers see it that 
way.

[...]
> With IPv6, the problem in most cases for personal use is that your ISP 
> probably isn't "playing" in that arena yet -- and won't route your v6 
> addresses directly, so you end up tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 to someone 
> kind enough to dump you into the v6 backbone.  If either end of that v4 
> tunnel is down, you're down.  Not to say it's not worth experimenting 
> with, but it's more difficult right now than say in a few years when 
> more v6-friendly ISP's are out there.

Yeah, I have little hope of having an IPv6 capable ISP before 80% of the 
world does.  Be fun to play with though, even if tunneled.

DoD is pushing IPv6 for 2008 so that might get things moving.  My office 
is planning to convert from global IPv4 addresses to private addresses 
soon.  This is perceived to make it easier to set up an enterprise wide 
WAN (for security and Active Directory purposes).  I suggested that we 
just go with IPv6 (rather than doing the enterprise wide readdressing 
again in 5 or so years).  But beyond "we'll all be retired in 5 years so 
it'll be your problem then" I don't get much discussion on the subject.

Thanks for listening.

Dave