240/4

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Thu Oct 18 22:32:46 UTC 2007


> > why on earth would you want to go and hack this stuff together,  
> > knowing that it WILL NEVER WORK
> 
> Because I have read reports from people whose technical expertise I
> trust. They modified the TCP/IP code of Linux and FreeBSD and were able
> to freely use 240/4 address space to communicate between machines. This
> means that IT WILL WORK.
> 
> The reports stated that the code patch was simple because it involved
> simply removing a line of code that disallowed 240/4 addresses.
> 
> This demonstrates that enabling 240/4 is a very simple technical issue.
> The only real difficulty here is getting the right people to act on it.
> 
> Companies like Cisco don't even need to wait for the IETF in order to
> implement a command like
>    ip class-e
> as long as they ship it with a default of
>    no ip class-e

I don't even know where to begin.  Well, maybe here:

"The only real difficulty here is getting the right people to act on it."

That neatly sums up the problem.

When you can round up:

1) All the programmers for all the tens of thousands of different IP
   devices that are out on the market, have them dig up the source code
   for these devices (some of which may have been a few employers ago),
   and you get them all to agree to post updated copies of their firmware,
   which might be problematic for those companies that went T.U.,

You still have the giant problem of:

2) Getting over 100 MILLION users to all update the BILLIONS of devices
   that are out there with that firmware.

Once you have a game plan for getting those hundred million people to do
this, then we may have something to talk about.  Until then, not so much.

Your "people whose technical expertise <you> trust" clearly figured out
that there are cases where you can make moving an IPv4-240+ packet work.
Anyone can make that happen.  However, they apparently failed to impress
upon you that what they were (hopefully) saying is that "enabling IPv4-
240+ on a single device is a very simple technical issue."  Deploying it 
on a wider scale ... not so simple.

What kind of customer would actively solicit an IP address assignment
that won't reach random segments of the Internet?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.



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