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

Fri Nov 19 13:01:47 UTC 2021

John Gilmore wrote on 19/11/2021 01:54:
> Lowest address is in the most recent Linux and
> FreeBSD kernels, but not yet in any OS distros.

lowest addresses will not be viable until widely supported on router 
(including CPE) platforms.  This is hard to test in the wild - ripe 
atlas will only test the transit path rather than the local connection. 
I.e. it's not clear that what you're measuring here is a valid way of 
working out whether a lowest address is generally going to work, because 
.0 has been mostly accepted in the transit path since the 1990s (bit 
alarming to see that it's still not universal).

The other risk with the lowest address proposal is that it will break 
network connectivity transitivity with no fallback or detection 
mechanism.  I.e. consider three hosts on a broadcast domain: A, B and C. 
  A uses the lowest address, B accepts a lowest address, but C does not. 
  Then A can talk to B, B can talk to C, but C cannot talk to A.  This 
does not seem to be addressed in the draft.

Nick