Getting a "portable" /19 or /20

Tue Apr 10 05:20:50 UTC 2001

> 192.0.2.0/24 was earmarked by Jon Postel for use in documentation.

> It was never to show up in a routing table as a prefix that would be
> forwarded.

It's useful for pictures showing "Host A sends packets to Host B" when
they're both on the same network. It's not useful for illustrating how
things really happen out on the Internet, particularly when errors which
must be returned to the sender are involved.

It's like the example.com domain, which is also set aside for document
purposes. example.com is useful for illustrating high-level concepts in
white papers ("your SMTP client connects to the server..."), but it is not
useful for describing in detail the dozen DNS transactions that happen
when sendmail delivers a message to a remote site. That requires a real
domain with MX backups and real addresses and everything.

The example blocks/domains are useful for what they are, but their scope
of usefulness is much smaller than real blocks/domains when it comes to
documenting the detailed interactions between hosts and networks on the
public Internet.

This thread is way OT. Private queries preferred. Thanks.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/