Redeploying most of 127/8, 0/8, 240/4 and *.0 as unicast

Nick Hilliard nick at foobar.org
Thu Nov 18 20:58:18 UTC 2021


John Gilmore wrote on 18/11/2021 19:37:
> There will be no future free-for-all that burns through 300 million
> IPv4 addresses in 4 months.

this is correct not necessarily because of the reasons you state, but 
because all the RIRs have changed their ipv4 allocation policies to 
policies which assume complete or near-complete depletion of the 
available pools, rather than policies which allocate / assign on the 
basis of stated requirement.  For sure, organisations were previously 
requesting more than they needed, but if stated-requirement were 
reinstituted as a policy basis, the address space would disappear in a 
flash.

The point remains that 127/8, 0/8, 240/4 are problematic to debogonise, 
and are not going to make a dramatic impact to the availability of ipv4 
addresses in the longer term.  Same with using the lowest ip address in 
a network block.  Nice idea, but 30 years late.

There's no problem implementing these ideas in code and quietly using 
the address space in private contexts.

Nick


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