Dear John: 0) Appreciate very much for your comments. 1) "A traceroute from my machine to 240.1.2.3 goes through six routers at my ISP before stopping (probably at the first default-route-free router). ": Great, this confirms our experience. While our team's skill is far inferior than yours, we did use Xubuntu based PCs to send TraceRoute packets with 240/4 addresses into the Internet and got records indicating that they had traveled through at least a couple routers into Verizon's network a few years ago. Those observations kept us going, even though all we heard from the Internet community was "240/4 could not and should not be used". 2) " What I do understand is that since his effort uses 240/4 addresses as the outer addresses in IPv4 packets, it couldn't work without reaching our goal first: ": Exactly, We are in sync. I am glad that your team is doing the ground work of enabling 240/4 for unicast. EzIP is a specific application of such a capability as a private netblock. Yet, due to its size, it is possible to consider a global deployment configuration. 3) " ... I don't fully understand. ... allowing any site on the Internet to send unicast packets to or from 240.0.0.1 and having them arrive. ": Sorry that I have not made our presentation clear enough, thus misled you to this uncertainty. EzIP proposes to deploy 240/4 address based RANs, each tethering off the current Internet via one IPv4 public address. As such, the collection of RANs forms an overlay network layer wrapping around the current Internet core. Consequently, only the SPRs in the RAN need to be able to transport 240/4 addressed packets. This is why we talk about enabling new (but based on existing design) routers to use 240/4 netblock for serving as SPRs, but not perturbing any routers in the current Internet. 4) I would like to share one intriguing graphics (see URL below) that is almost perfect for depicting the EzIP deployment configuration. Consider the blue sphere as the earth or the current Internet core and the golden colored land as the RANs. By connecting each continent, country or all the way down to a Region to the earth via one IPv4 address, we have the EzIP configuration. With this architecture, each RAN looks like a private network. Thus, everything proposed by EzIP can be done in the RANs, independent of the current Internet. https://dotconnectafrica.org/icann-wins-by-technical-knockout-dca-blocked-fr... I do realize that the EzIP concept is rather unorthodox, making it difficult to visualize at a glance. Hope this clarifies the overall picture a bit. Regards, Abe (2022-03-27 00:31) On 2022-03-26 21:42, John Gilmore wrote:
*/writing/* and */deploying/* the code that will allow the use of 240/4 the way you expect While Mr. Chen may have considered that, he has repeatedly hand waved that it's 'not that big a deal.', so I don't think he adequately grasps the scale of that challenge. From multiple years of patching and testing, the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project knows that 240/4 ALREADY WORKS in a large fraction of the Internet. Including all the Linux servers and desktops, all the Android
Tom Beecher<beecher@beecher.cc> wrote: phones and tablets, all the MacOS machines, all the iOS phones, many of the home wifi gateways. All the Ethernet switches. And some less popular stuff like routers from Cisco, Juniper, and OpenWRT. Most of these started working A DECADE AGO. If others grasp the scale of the challenge better than we do, I'm happy to learn from them.
A traceroute from my machine to 240.1.2.3 goes through six routers at my ISP before stopping (probably at the first default-route-free router).
Today Google is documenting to its cloud customers that they should use 240/4 for internal networks. (Read draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-240 for the citation.) We have received inquiries from two other huge Internet companies, which are investigating or already using 240/4 as private IPv4 address space.
In short, we are actually making it work, and writing a spec for what already works. Our detractors are arguing: not that it doesn't work, but that we should instead seek to accomplish somebody else's goals.
John
PS: Mr. Abraham Chen's effort is not related to ours. Our drafts are agnostic about what 240/4 should be used for after we enable it as ordinary unicast. His EzIP overlay network effort is one that I don't fully understand. What I do understand is that since his effort uses 240/4 addresses as the outer addresses in IPv4 packets, it couldn't work without reaching our goal first: allowing any site on the Internet to send unicast packets to or from 240.0.0.1 and having them arrive.
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