RIPE NCC and APNIC close to doom date

In the previous article I have shown the distribution of the IANA IPv4 /8 prefix assignment over different local registries: APNIC, ARIN, AFRINIC, RIPE NCC, LACNIC and the special purpose addresses. Now I would like to go into details about the current situation in different registries - for that purpose I have modified a bit the Ruby tooling so that it shows and forecasts the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space on a per registry basis.

First chart below presents the comparison between the number of /8 prefixes that were assigned to a local RIR and the number of prefixes allocated by the RIR. Actually what is surprisng that the two registries that have the biggest dynamics in the IPv4 assignments are in the worst situation - namely RIPE NCC and APNIC have the smallest number of addresses available for assignment.

On one hand the chart above gives a good overview about the available address space within each registry but it does not give any information about the trend and the dynamics in the allocations (which can be used to make the forecast when the address space will be exhausted). The charts below show the growth in the assignment on a per registry basis. Additionally there have been a trend line added for the forecasting purposes. In addition to the chart the doom date has been calculated by my tooling and the results are as follows:

• RIPENCC -> 29.07.2011
• APNIC -> 21.09.2011
• AFRINIC -> 29.10.2016
• ARIN -> 03.01.2018
• LACNIC -> 16.11.2012

It means if the situation does not change the Europe will be the first one that will suffer from lack of public IPv4 addresses for assignment. Two months later the Asian/Pacific region will run into the same toruble. Next months will show if the allocation dynamics will remain as they are and IANA does not use the "E pool". However in my opinion we should observe much bigger interest and movement in the IPv6 area from now on.

Last /8 IPv4 prefix assigned by IANA

Recently it was announced that the last available /8 prefix has been assigned by IANA and there is no further assignment possible. Indeed that is true but one has to keep in mind that there is still the whole "pool E" (IPv4 address space) reserved for future use and could be used for further assignment if IANA decides to do that. One has to also keep in mind that the local registries still have some address space left (I will discuss that in my next article) but the current status means that it will not be possible to extend their pool of addresses. Below one can find the distribution of /8 addresses to different parties:

WinXP: Change drive letter assigments

Today I had a problem with the letters that were assigned to disks. I bought a new disc, copied under Knoppix the content of the old disc to the new one, booted from the new one - however the old disc still had letter C assigned and the new one D. Moreover it was not possible to change the assignments via GUI (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disc Management).

Fortunately I found a way to succed -> namely via registry update. It seems that WinXP stores the assignments in the special place in the registry. One can easily modify it by using the regedit utility and modify the keys as shown on the attached picture (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices)

Exact procedure (D is the boot drive on C the pagefile is located) is as follows:

1. Do a full backup of the registry

2. Run the regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

3. Rename the \DosDevices\C: to something like \DosDevices\Z:

4. Rename the \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:

5. Rename the \DosDevices\Z: to \DosDevices\D:

6. Exit regedit and reboot the system

It worked in my case!