Only 5x IPv4 /8 remaining at IANA

Wed Oct 20 00:18:55 UTC 2010

On 20/10/10 01:52, Matthew Walster wrote:
> No, and neither can anyone else... What's more is that they'll not use
> .0, .255, .1 (because apparently only routers are supposed to use
> that), .254 (who knows...)

There's actually a good reason for that.

MS Windows (at least 2k3 server) will simply drop packets with a source
address of .0 or .255 coming from the legacy class C space, this hit us
with some Win 2k3 servers that for a bunch of stupid reasons needed to
be connected to from natted hosts, and the next pool IP off the pile was
a .255 address somewhere in 192.168.0.0/16. Took quite a while to
diagnose as wireshark on the host wouldn't see the packet, but
eventually we could verify the packet made it all the way to the machine.

The fact that this may be UI in 2010 is very depressing, and a prime
example of why there's no way the "class-E" space will ever be generally
usable.

Julien