How about putting an A or AAAA record in a reverse DNS zone, so your site ends up looking like http://2.0.192.in-addr.arpa/ or whatever. There is no registry involved with the delegation of those reverse zones, so it would be alot more difficult for anyone to interfere with it.

What will make it even more fun is if you have two branch offices of the same company connected to the different ISPs getting 172.16.32.66 and 10.0.65.88, how do you set up a VPN between them?

We have assigned 14 /8's _this year_ so far, so if you magically get all of those back, you don't even get a years delay. I guess when you say 'That's a LOT of unused IP's' the missing information is that 'We go through a LOT of IP's'.

Spend that effort and money on deploying IPv6 instead.

We use up almost 2 /8's every month.

You could go through every one of those and fight the massive legal battle to get them all back ( probably taking us well beyond the date when we are out anyway ), and you have only bought a year or two.

Save yourself the trouble and deploy IPv6, instead of making lawyers rich and then deploying IPv6.

Whoever was telling you that we were going to run out in one year five years ago was probably smoking methamphetamines at the time.

The IANA free pool will run out next year, probably before mid year.

The point at which you can't actually receive any more addresses won't come until the RIRs exhaust the blocks that they have received from IANA which might not be for another year after that.

I don't know where you have been getting your predictions. It is pretty certain that IANA is going to run out of space about the middle of next year.

We have 14 /8's left in the IANA free pool, we use up almost 2 /8's every month.

Are you betting on the ipv4 space usage magically decreasing ( right when everyone will start freaking out about getting their last allocations )?

Where am I supposed to skip to if I'm starting in .nz?

I Hope noone in any sort of IT role reads this article and decides to put off their IPv6 projects.

The IPv6 killer app is IPv4 address space runout. http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

Unless you are a person who has actually applied for IPv4 address space for a project ( eg. new ISP broadband product, new co-location room, planning for next years subscriber growth etc. ), you are going to have alot more work to do to imagine what is going to happen when the first bunch of IPv4 space applications are declined ( more likely approved but put on the waiting list ).

People who actually use up big wads of IPv4 space are either going to have to decide that you have to push IPv6 into the project in some form, or you are going to design up some sort of multi layer NAT monstrosity along with the huge mess that is going to make. The IPv6 doom sayers are just trying to convince people to choose the one off pain of the IPv6 migration over a giant mess of NAT forevermore. If you really love the multilayer NAT and don't want to live without it, then be consoled by the fact that you probably are going to get it along side your IPv6 for at least a while anyway.

If you are the editor of some PC mag, you aren't actually going to get to choose what happens and you probably should just shut up.

Agreed that the general idea would be a good thing.

However, how do you come up with a workable definition of "keep developing"? Would employing a drunk homeless guy to translate the comments in the source code from English to ancient hebrew making releases 6 monthly count?

Dear Rupert,

We will honour /robots.txt under penalty of contract, perjery, cross my heart and pinky swear.

Signed

Google.

You are probably seeing two different types of people replying.

The first will be people who have been using Linux for years and have probably unconsciously been picking hardware that gives no trouble with every purchasing decision they make. These people do a fresh install of the latest version of Ubuntu and are amazed because the random printer that they brought home from work goes properly along with everything else that they have. A small subset of this group will also just be lucky.

The second are people who have recently been through Linux running on an old ex-windows box with the cheapest nastiest random usb junk + ATI video they had and given up and bought a new box picking the troublesome parts themselves.

I doubt either group will be trying to be deceptive, they have just had different experiences.

You are mistaken, the prefixes in question are blocks assigned directly to end users that qualify for a block by needing multihoming.

The first few prefixes in the list in the article have been assigned to organisations like CNET and the Smithsonian Institute, that require reliable connectivity, but don't qualify as an ISP as such.

The messy bit is even some of the IANA name servers look to be in those blocks, so they are even blocking access to some important infrastructure by choosing to filter them.

No, it forces you to offer your software for Free. You can charge whatever you want for it.

If you want to be really pedantic, it was the script writer, in the office, with a typewriter.

Also if you're flying a twin-engined fighter like a P-38 Lightning & have lots of altitude.

The story goes that a test pilot has been told that /nobody/ can rescue the P-38 from a flat spin, so he has to try (because it's there). He eventually succeeds in getting his '38 out of a flat spin, but it took IIRC about thirty thousand feet of altitude. He said the trick was to figure out which way the plane was spinning, apply max power on the inside engine (toward the spin), cut power on the outside, apply full reverse rudder, and hang on for dear life. He had only a few thousand feet to spare.