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Sobering but not really surprising analysis in Ars Technica the other day: we're rapidly approaching the day we run out of IP addresses. The article describes how the system works, and why we're likely to hit the end of the road a bit sooner than you might expect.
In the long run, we can hope for the happy day when IPv6 is deployed widely enough to be a practical alternative, but in the short run things look kind of grim, especially for power users of large ISPs. Simply by necessity, they're likely to be moving more and more towards carrier-grade NATs -- essentially giant routers that work kind of like the way the one in your home does. The result would be that all of their customers wind up NATted, whether they like it or not, probably without any good way to punch holes in the NAT. And the result of *that* is that power-user features like peer-to-peer and dynamic DNS may become more or less infeasible.
Sucketh most mightily, not least as a reminder of how annoying it is that IPv6 is taking so long to roll out...
In the long run, we can hope for the happy day when IPv6 is deployed widely enough to be a practical alternative, but in the short run things look kind of grim, especially for power users of large ISPs. Simply by necessity, they're likely to be moving more and more towards carrier-grade NATs -- essentially giant routers that work kind of like the way the one in your home does. The result would be that all of their customers wind up NATted, whether they like it or not, probably without any good way to punch holes in the NAT. And the result of *that* is that power-user features like peer-to-peer and dynamic DNS may become more or less infeasible.
Sucketh most mightily, not least as a reminder of how annoying it is that IPv6 is taking so long to roll out...