Class D addresses? was: Redploying most of 127/8 as unicast public
Michael Thomas
mike at mtcc.com
Sat Nov 20 19:59:50 UTC 2021
On 11/20/21 11:41 AM, Jay Hennigan wrote:
> On 11/20/21 11:01, Michael Thomas wrote:
>
>> There is just as big a block of addresses with class D addresses for
>> broadcast. Is broadcast really even a thing these days? I know tons
>> of work went into it, but it always seemed that brute force and
>> ignorance won out using unicast. Even if it has some niche uses, I
>> seriously doubt that it needs 400M addresses. If you wanted to
>> reclaim ipv4 addresses it seems that class D and class E would be a
>> much better target than loopback.
>
> It's multicast, not broadcast. A very small chunk is used by some
> routing protocols and it has uses in several streaming applications,
> but indeed it's much larger than it practically needs to be.
>
> However, IMNSHO, all of these proposals if adopted are really just
> going to make a few people richer in the short term after their
> adoption and will not do anything significant to solve the problem of
> IPv4 exhaustion long-term.
>
Yeah, sorry brain fart. I'm mostly in the camp of just getting on with
it with ipv6, but starving the beast doesn't have a great track record.
We are talking about 20% of the address space that's being wasted so
it's not nothing.
Mike
More information about the NANOG
mailing list