[CQ] It's time to give up the 44.x.x.x address block

[Bruce Perens]

Well, this was to Brian Kantor (who runs the address block) and Phil 
Karn (author of KA9Q TCP/IP) who know that stuff, and to some other 
influential hams, some of whom will ask Kantor and Karn for their 
opinion. I'd already seen the old TAPR paper on embedding callsigns in 
IPV6 addresses, but it's good to know about the APRS-IS server.

     Thanks

     Bruce

On 10/22/2010 10:32 AM, Greg Albrecht W2GMD wrote:
> Bruce,
> First, I agree with both the observations you've made as well as the
> reasons you've cited for returning the address block in question.
>
> However, I'm disappointed that you did not include links to any
> ongoing Amateur Radio IPv6 implementation projects. Is this because
> these projects do not exist?
>
> A quick Google finds:
>
> http://www.db0anf.de/ - Runs an IPv6 Enabled APRS-IS server.
> http://www.tapr.org/pub_dcc17.html - TAPR proceedings from 1998!
>
> Clearly there's a lot of work to be done.
>
> -g
>
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Bruce Perens<bruce at perens.com>  wrote:
>    
>> I sent this to some influential Amateurs this morning.
>>
>>      Bruce
>>
>> Dear Fellow Amateurs,
>>
>> You may have seen the news that Interop has returned its IP address
>> block to ARIN. See
>> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/10/embargoed-interop-gives-back-a-months-worth-of-ipv4-addresses.ars
>>
>> This was done as a means of prompting other organizations that hold
>> large, mostly-unused blocks - that means us - to return them now that we
>> are approaching the exhaustion of available IPV4 addresses.
>>
>> Amateur Radio holds a block of 16 million IP addresses that are mostly a
>> relic of past operation. When TCP/IP over 1200 baud packet was
>> interesting, the IP address pool was far from exhaustion and holding
>> that block had no cost to the general public. Now, Amateur Radio is a
>> very significant contributor to the problem of global IPV4 address
>> exhaustion.
>>
>> Obviously it is true that everybody must convert to IPV6. As Amateurs,
>> technically competent and in complete control of our own networking
>> infrastructure, this is an easy place for us to lead. It isn't so for
>> the global internet. Commercial internet providers must struggle with a
>> tremendous technically-naive user pool who must be guided through
>> conversion or provided with address translation kludges that will cause
>> service problems, routing hardware that can't be converted to IPV6, and
>> a tremendous expense of converting all of this infrastructure and
>> training users and their own staff that has come at a really bad time
>> economically.
>>
>> Thus, I suggest that Amateurs would be fulfilling their social duty to
>> the public by returning an address pool that they no longer need as soon
>> as possible, and leading in conversion of their remaining and future
>> TCP/IP operations to IPV6.
>>
>> This isn't like giving up a frequency band that will never be returned -
>> equivalent IPV6 address blocks are available to us, and the IPV6 address
>> space is astronomical in size compared to IPV4.
>>
>>      Many Thanks
>>
>>      Bruce Perens K6BP
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>>      
>
>
>