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Re: Support for 240/4 and 0/8 addresses in NetBSD



On Sat 10 Jun 2023 at 08:11:01 -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Until we really understand the standardization status, I don't think we
> should commit any changes.

I remember reading about some of these proposals (there were several,
all with the same gist to re-purpose addresses for general use, but
differing in the details of which address ranges they pertain to).

If the set of proposals has been whittled down to changing 240/4 and
0/8, I think the most controversial one may have been dropped already.
I seem to remember proposals about 127/8 or /16 and about the
all-bits-zero address in the host-part of all CIDR subnets.

DuckDuckGoing for "IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project" finds me
https://storage.googleapis.com/site-media-prod/meetings/NANOG84/2480/20220215_Schoen_Reducing_Ipv4_Address_v1.pdf
which is a bit older and presents the gist of those proposals, and
presents some context.

General objections against the proposals I remember include "the gain is
so trivial, it'll be used up in no time", "why bother with IPv4 when
we'll have to switch to IPv6 anyway, even with these proposals", "there
are lots of embedded devices that speak IPv4 which will never get
updated", "there is too much software that has baked in some of these
restrictions, we'll never find and fix it all".

Currently working at an ISP, my impression is that freeing the 0 address
in each subnet might be the most useful of the proposals, since lots of
customers of ours who have their own address ranges have very small
ranges, such as /29, where the loss of one address per range is
relatively big.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert                            <rhialto/at/falu.nl>
\X/ There is no AI. There is just someone else's work.           --I. Rose

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