[Wolves] It's the end of the internet as we know it

[Alex Willmer]

On 4 February 2011 15:30, David Goodwin <david at codepoets.co.uk> wrote:
> So, why not free up the stuff 'former class e reserved' and I'd guess the 'multicast' stuff (does anyone use multicast?) - I'm not saying that solves the problem, but if they're not being used....
> (I'm quite clueless about networking, so *shrug*)

I am also quite clueless on the subject. My third-hand understanding
is that there's deployed software and hardware that treats those
regions as invalid/not for normal traffic. So such an address wouldn't
be globally routable - nodes using one for unicast traffic would get
unreliable service or find they couldn't reach/couldn't be reached by
some networks. Presumably the effort and expense of upgrading all the
devices causing that would be comparable to finding them and upgrading
them to IPv6. IIRC the Asia Pacific NIC consumed one and a bit /8
blocks in January.

Wikipedia mentions using the former class C region in a similar manner
to 192.168 et al. A large private range for ISP level NAT schemes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Reclamation_of_unused_IPv4_space

-- 
Alex Willmer <alex at moreati.org.uk>
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