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.
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:
Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> 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
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.
