I would agree. I don't see it as a problem using it, but I was mainly wondering about what other people thought of using it. And yes, it's nice to use as people are using RFC1918 addresses in their networks and you can be sure that 169.254.0.0/16 isn't used. At least until people do start using it and then you have the same overlapping problem again
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:18:56 -0400 From: msa@latt.net To: darrenoc@outlook.com CC: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: 169.254.0.0/16
On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 06:59:09PM +0100, Darren O'Connor wrote:
I've just set up a vpn tunnel to Amazon's AWS and as part of the config they required me to configure to /30 tunnels using addressing from the 169.254.0.0/16 space.
Yeah, they do that for Direct Connect.
RFC3927 basically says that this address should only be used as a temp measure until the interface has a proper private or public address.
So? :)
So what's the consensus then? Is their a problem using this space as link-local address for routers here and there (I mean we have 65K addresses wasted in this block) or is it a strict no-no? And if no, why is Amazon using it?
RFCs are just paper. As for why they use it.. the common private use reserved blocks (10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16) are all in use internally in their customers networks. This is probably the easiest way to avoid addressing conflicts.
Since these networks are all isolated, I don't see a great deal of harm in it (probably less than overlapping more commonly used private blocks.)
--msa