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

Fri Nov 19 15:38:44 UTC 2021

> On Nov 18, 2021, at 12:54 , John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> 
> Steven Bakker <steven.bakker at ams-ix.net> wrote:
>> The ask is to update every ip stack in the world (including validation,
>> equipment retirement, reconfiguration, etc)...
> 
> This raises a great question.
> 
> Is it even *doable*?  What's the *risk*?  What will it *cost* to upgrade
> every node on the Internet?  And *how long* might it take?
> 
> We succeeded in upgrading every end-node and every router in the
> Internet in the late '90s and early 2000's, when we deployed CIDR.  It
> was doable.  We know that because we did it!  (And if we hadn't done it,
> the Internet would not have scaled to world scale.)

Actually, CIDR didn’t require upgrading every end-node, just some of them.

That’s what made it doable… Updating only routers, not end-nodes.

Another thing that made it doable is that there were a LOT fewer end-nodes
and a much smaller vendor space when it came to the source of routers
that needed to be updated.

Further, in the CIDR deployment days, routers were almost entirely still
CPU-switched rather than ASIC or even line-card switched. Heck, the
workhorse backbone router that stimulated the development of CIDR
was built on an open-standard Mutlibus backplane with a MIPS CPU
IIRC. That also made widespread software updates a much simpler
proposition. Hardly anyone had a backbone router that was older than
an AGS (in fact, even the AGS was relatively rare in favor of the AGS+).

I’d venture to guess that something north of 90% of BGP-speaking routers
were running IOS of the day (version 8.something, if memory serves).
Juniper didn’t exist yet. Arista didn’t exist yet. Foundry? Nope.
etc.

Proteon was mostly out of business and didn’t really make anything in that
class. Wellfleet did, but they had a very small market share.

The lift is a lot harder today and the potential benefits continue to shrink.

> That may not be worth it to you.  Or to your friends.  But it would be
> useful to a lot of people -- hundreds of millions of people who you may
> never know.  People who didn't get IP addresses when they were free,
> people outside the US and Europe, who will be able to buy and use them
> in 5 or 10 years, rather than leaving them unused and rotting on the
> vine.

I question this assertion. I might buy tens of thousands of people, but I find
it pretty hard to give credibility to the idea that this would make a significant
difference to hundreds of millions of people. It’s not going to reduce NAT
or CGN deployment significantly. It’s not going to speed up IPv6 deployment
in any meaningful way.

You’re going to have to make a much stronger case for the benefit here
being significant if you want that argument to be taken seriously.

Owen