Microsoft TechEd conference hit by IPv4 exhaustion

Microsoft Australia has been forced to seek temporary IPv4 address space for its annual TechEd conference from an ISP after being knocked back by the regional registrar APNIC.

Web platform architect evangelist Jorke Odolphi told iTnews that Microsoft hoped to secure a temporary allocation "in the next month or so".

Odolphi surfaced an email trail on the event's backstage blog seeking an IPv4 /17 public address range – which contained some 32,768 addresses – and an IPv6 /48.

"The earliest date we would be using these addresses is the 1st of July 2011," Odolphi told APNIC on 22 March.

"We would return the addresses on the 16th of September 2011."

While it succeeded in getting the temporary IPv6 range, APNIC knocked Microsoft back for the temporary IPv4 allocation the event had used in past years.

APNIC had maintained a pool of IPv4 addresses that was used for temporary events like Microsoft's TechEd and the annual Linux Conference.

"This reserved address space is no longer available as it has been placed back in the APNIC free pool for distribution," APNIC told Odolphi.

"There is no IPv4 address space available for temporary allocation."

Odolphi was confident of securing the required IPv4 address range from an ISP.

Major players Optus and Telstra were among those known to have stockpiled IPv4 addresses.

However, Odolphi noted that the lack of a temporary APNIC address pool could pose issues for TechEd's network in "upcoming years", accentuated by a current lack of interest by Microsoft's engineers in using network address translation (NAT) based on past experiences.

Odolphi said that Microsoft Australia had "run into port exhaustion issues on the NAT edge" using enterprise-grade equipment and was struggling to justify shelling out the $80,000-plus for carrier-grade equipment, although he noted that a change in stance may be required in the future.

Part of Odolphi's original blog post was an April Fool's joke that this year's Tech.Ed would not offer IPv4 connectivity.