202203071610.AYC Re: Making Use of 240/4 NetBlock

Fri Mar 11 03:50:05 UTC 2022

Dear Seth:

1)    " ...  should be ...  ":    Instead of "hand wave", this is a 
diplomatic expression to challenge the software engineers' knowledge of 
the networking program code for the current case. Ever since we started 
our study, we were quite puzzled by why the 240/4 netblock was regarded 
so special? Why no one could tell us what led to its current status, and 
even after IPv4 was set to transition to IPv6? ... etc. We also could 
not find anyone who could describe to us how was it being handled in the 
existing programs. This included those who claimed to be experts in the 
subject. Perhaps they intentionally tried to hide the detail, or they 
also did not know? One day, we finally came across a program fragment 
that could perform the "disabling 240/4 netblock" function. Upon 
presenting it to an acquaintance knowledgeable of networking programs, 
he confirmed that it was one concise technique to do the job. That was 
sufficient for our purpose as system engineers, because we should not 
overstep our duties by doing software engineer's programing task. That 
is, as long as we can demonstrate that "there exists" a solution, like 
proofing a mathematics theorem, we have completed our part of the deal.

2)    " ... discussed to death many times over ...  ":    This was what 
we were told when we first looked into this subject over half a dozen 
years ago, and more times along the way. As long as there was an issue 
not resolved, however, every angle should be continuously explored. In 
science and engineering, if we stopped studying, because of this kind of 
viewpoint, we would have missed a lot of inventions and discoveries. So, 
this particular consideration is not in our books.

Regards,

Abe (2022-03-10 22:49 EST)

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NANOG Digest, Vol 170, Issue 11

Message: 10
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2022 10:29:22 -0800
From: Seth Mattinen<sethm at rollernet.us>
To:nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: 202203071610.AYC Re: Making Use of 240/4 NetBlock
Message-ID:<0c6c8b63-6e84-92da-2e28-89b2b5c6d639 at rollernet.us>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 3/7/22 2:14 PM, Abraham Y. Chen wrote:

> The cost of this software engineering should be minimal.

So basically no solution is offered to what is the showstopper for this
proposal, only a hand wave that it "should be" easy to fix (but that's
everyone else's problem). I mean, I believe this has been discussed to
death many times over in the past and yet here we still are.

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