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

Sun Nov 21 20:38:28 UTC 2021

On 11/20/21 9:29 PM, Jay Hennigan wrote:
> On 11/19/21 10:27, William Herrin wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> That depends on your timeline. Do you know many non-technical people
>> still using their Pentium III computers with circa 2001 software
>> versions? Connected to the Internet?
>
> There are lots of very old networked industrial machines with embedded 
> computers operated by non-network-savvy people that are still very 
> much in use.
>
> Think CNC machines in machine shops, SCADA systems, etc. I wouldn't be 
> a bit surprised to find quite a few 2001-era boxes still in service.

At some level I think there's a good chance that they'd just work. I 
wrote a significant amount of the Lantronix terminal server code and it 
never occurred to me that I should enforce rules about 127.0.0.0 or 
Class D or Class E. It really didn't have much bearing on a terminal 
server or the other host-like things we built. If you typed it in, it 
would work, if you  listened on a port it wouldn't care what the address 
was. I would imagine that lots of stacks from back in the day were just 
like that.

Mike