Chapter5.The Date of Doom

Chapter 5. The Date of Doom

The Internet, as well as its parent, DARPAnet, grew very slowly at first. This slow growth led to complacency with respect to the finite supply of addresses, and it masked the limits inherent in the Internet's addressing system. The general belief was that there were so many addresses relative to demand that the supply would never be exhausted. The combination of latent architectural inefficiencies and wasteful assignment practices would rear its ugly head soon after the Internet's commercialization.

It wasn't long before the IETF could extrapolate the date by which a portion of the IPv4 address space would become depleted. That projected date became known as the Date of Doom. The IETF responded via a flurry of activities geared toward buying enough time to prevent the Date of Doom from becoming reality. These activities ranged from the very simple to the remarkably complex. This chapter focuses on just the short-term initiatives. Chapter 6, "Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR)," and Chapter 7, "Private Addresses and NAT," round out the arsenal of technologies developed to combat the crisis by looking at the more-complex initiatives: Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR), private addresses, and Network Address Translation (NAT).

Each of the time-buying activities outlined in this chapter achieved varying levels of success, but they have had an indelible impact on how the Internet's address space is managed today.