Despite clear warnings, Europe is out of IP addresses—again

Enlarge / This is RIPE's new IPv4 waiting list. If you've never received IP addresses from RIPE before, you can request a single /24 (256 IPs) and wait for somebody to croak and relinquish theirs. (credit: Jim Salter)

Monday afternoon, RIPE-Ri(C)seaux IP Europi(C)ens-or the regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia-announced that it's out of IPv4 addresses.

What this means is that the organization has handed out its last available /22 (1,022 address) netblock. If you need European public IP addresses of your very own, you must get on a waiting list and hope for some other company to die on the vine and relinquish its address space when it does.

There are some caveats to RIPE's used-IPv4-address car lot, though. To get on the waiting list, you must never have received any subnet from RIPE in the past... and you may only receive a single /24 subnet. That gets you 256 total IPv4 addresses, three of which are used just to set the whole thing up (network, broadcast, and gateway). So if you plan to have more than 253 devices connected, you're going to need to get thrifty and figure out how many of them can be put behind NAT (Network Address Translation).

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