The power of default configurations

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Fri Apr 8 10:00:29 UTC 2005


> > So, this highlights some good operational practices in networking and
> > DNS-applications, but doesn't answer how 1918 is 'different' or 
'special'
> > than any other ip address. I think what I was driving at is that 
putting
> > these proposed road blocks in bind is akin to the 'cisco auto secure'
> > features.
> 
> when you attempt to solve a routing problem by addressing tricks,
> you're gonna pay for it forever in ever-expanding ways.  this is
> just one of them.

Hmmm... interesting. Routing is basically the dynamic exchange
of address ranges and their attributes through various protocols. 
Normally routers do the talking, but that is only incidental.

One might look at this issue and say that IETF RFC human
readable documents are not the best way to communicate address
ranges and their attributes, therefore RFC 1918 is fatally flawed.
Similarly, the IANA page at 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
is also flawed because, although it is accessible via the HTTP
protocol, it is clearly intended to be a human readable document
no different from an RFC.

But now let's turn out attention to Team Cymru's bogon project.
Here we see that they are offering the dynamic exchange of
address ranges and their attributes through various protocols
such as DNS, RADB and BGP. Clearly this falls on the "routing"
side of the fence.

Which leads me to the question: Why are RFC 1918 addresses defined
in a document rather than in an authoritative protocol feed which
people can use to configure devices? Perhaps if they were defined
in a protocol feed of some sort, like DNS, then device manufacturers
would make their devices autoconfigure using that feed?

--Michael Dillon




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