It’s been an interesting week in the world of IPv4.  Still plenty of people trying to tell you that there’s no problem and no-one’s running out, but a couple of significant things have happened this week which are worth noting.

Firstly, RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe made an official announcement last Tuesday (4 September) that they were down to their last /10 above the final /8, which is 0.25 of a /8 or 4,194,304 addresses.  When this happens, RIPE move to ‘Phase 1’, which means that their allocation people work in pairs and scrutinise things much more closely.  In addition, things are processed very strictly in order and they will only communicate with you when your ticket is in the front of the queue.  RIPE have also made their official graph update daily now, which you can find at http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph

The second thing to happen this week has come from a rather unusual place – Iran.  Two different ISPs (who may or may not be government owned/controlled, I don’t know), asked for two blocks of addresses, one a /12 and another a /13 – a total of 1,572,864 in just one week.  The sensation caused the “Huston-o-Meter” (at http://ipv4.potaroo.net) to jump from 4 October to 27 September and now stands, at the time of writing, at 22 September.  If any more large allocations occur between now and then, we could be looking at a run-out date of less than 2 weeks time!

Good time to keep your head in the sand, isn’t it?