As some of you may have already noticed, OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has recently started worrying about the utilization rate of the IPv4 address space. While the Internet penetration rate worldwide is only 15%, some 75% of IPv4 address space is already being used.

According to OECD, continuing with IPv4 is likely to create inequalities in the economic development going forward as only the elite (OECD refers to the rich western countries as “the elite”) would be able to enjoy the benefits and the new opportunites created by the Internet. As all of you guessed, the recommended solution to this problem is migration to IPv6.

For those of you who wish to dig deeper into OECD’s views on IPv6, please click here for a paper titled “Internet Address Space: Economic Considerations in the Management of IPv4 and in the Deployment of IPv6″. That’s a one hefty package for anyone interested in the policies and the macroeconomic considerations behind IPv6 migration.

After six weeks of blog silence, I’m back. Having made 107 posts here in the last 18 months, the writer’s block finally got me – there’s only so much one can say about DNS and virtualization, after all. From now on, I’m going to extend the scope of this blog from DNS and virtualization to also DHCP and IP address mgmt, as those two areas are also something we work with on daily basis. On this note, I’m planning on writing about Microsoft DHCP and UID & Network ID next week, so please stay tuned for more.

On a somewhat unrelated note, and as I’m sure most of you know, a blog really isn’t a blog unless the comment fields are activated. Also we tried doing that initially, but once we started receiving literally thousands of visits per day, the blog trolls came in in crowds. And so, after starting to receive hundreds of naughty links and comments on daily basis, we had to close them down in order not to become full time moderators.

Having said that, I realised during my six-week break that we should try to make this web journal (it’s really not a blog, is it?) more interactive. And on this note, I have a couple of questions to anyone who happens to be reading this:

1. Would You be interested in writing on DNS, DHCP, IP address management and virtualization?
2. Would You be interested in becoming a moderator for this blog / web journal? (assuming this wouldn’t be the one-pony show – yes, I’m the pony here – it has insofar been)

The reason I’m asking this is that assuming there’s enough interest, I think it might be quite an interesting experiment to convert this web journal into a BLOG (yes, with capital letters) where people who had something to say on DNS, DHCP and IP address management, could do so. And if someone was willing to moderate comments every now and then, all the better.

Nixu Software would be happy to continue to run this Wordpress platform for the purpose as well as to pick up all the server and bandwidth costs. And as I mentioned earlier on in the blog, we do get thousands of visitors each day here so there’s a good chance your blog entries would receive more attention than they would in most other places.

If you’re interested, please send us a note to info (at) nixusoftware.com. We’d appreciate a little background info (who you are and what you do) so that we don’t get fooled by the blog trolls! Ideally, I think it would be great to have 10+ writers so that no one would get hugely burdened – and of course to keep things interesting.

I’ll keep you posted on how this experiement takes off.