North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: 240/4

  • From: Stephen Sprunk
  • Date: Fri Oct 19 00:42:24 2007

Thus spake "Pekka Savola" <[email protected]>
The operators who want to do something private with this space don't need the IETF or IANA approval to do so. So they should just go
ahead and do it. If they can manage to get it to work, and live to tell about it, maybe we can consider that sufficient proof that we can start thinking about reclassification.

There are, fortunately, a number of vendors that don't like to go against existing RFCs. We're one of them. Regardless of customer demand, I will block any attempt inside our development group to allow 240/4 until the IETF reclassifies it from experimental to unicast address space. Note that doing that would _not_ automatically imply that the IETF would direct IANA to delegate that space to the RIRs; the IETF could direct IANA to mark one /8 as private and the rest reserved. Releasing the rest to the RIRs shouldn't be done until it is observed that a non-trivial number of hosts on the public network support it -- if that ever happens.

I can see cases for using 240/4 on private networks where one has more control over patches getting deployed (or is using OSes one can patch themselves or bully vendors to patch), but that's all that's worth discussing now. Short of someone from Microsoft indicating they'd post a patch on Windows Update for Vista, XP, and possibly earlier systems, any discussion of _when_ these addresses _might_ be usable on a public network is a waste of bits.

S

Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking