We’re getting closer and closer to IPv4 exhaustion. Soon, we will be completely out of IPv4 addresses. Now, this isn’t new. It’s been known for quite some time that this would happen. As a result, IPv6 was created. However, making the switch isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. While some sites have already started to make their transition over to IPv6 like Google, there’s still millions of sites to go. At the time of this post, there are only 22 /8′s left. A /8 is A.X.X.X. There’s a total of 256 /8′s, some of which are unusable such as loopback (127.0.0.1). Standford Univeristy, along with a few other organizations, have returned their /8 allocation in order to help slow down IPv4 exhaustion.
But here’s where it gets interesting. The United States Department of Defense has 11 /8′s allocated to them.
- 6.0.0.0/8
- 7.0.0.0/8
- 11.0.0.0/8
- 21.0.0.0/8
- 22.0.0.0/8
- 26.0.0.0/8
- 27.0.0.0/8
- 28.0.0.0/8
- 29.0.0.0/8
- 30.0.0.0/8
- 33.0.0.0/8
- 55.0.0.0/8
Now, why anyone would ever need 184,549,354 IP addresses is beyond me. When this was posted, the number of IP addresses the US Department of Defense owns is 50% of what we have left. If they were to release every /8 they owned (which is impractical), we would have enough IP addresses to add almost one year onto our IPv4 exhaustion time.
This isn’t really a big deal since IPv6 is right around the corner. But really? 184.5 Million IP addresses? Skynet is right around the corner…