On Jan 31, 2011, at 4:49 PM, Justin M. Streiner wrote:
On Mon, 31 Jan 2011, Jeremy wrote:
Has there been any discussion about allocating the Class E blocks? If this doesn't count as "future use" what does? (Yes, I realize this doesn't *fix* the problem here)
I think it has been discussed at various levels, but would likely have been dismissed for one or more of the following reasons: 1. A lot of people filter packets and/or prefixes 224/3 or 240/4 out of habit, right, wrong, or otherwise, so space from 240/4 is likely to have lots of reachability problems.
Also, many systems will not accept this traffic or configuration as hard-coded system parameters.
2. The effort expended by people to solve reachability problems from space they'd get out of 240/4 would be better put toward moving to v6.
Not to mention the software updates required to make it functional would exceed the software updates necessary for IPv6 _AND_ it has no lasting future.
3. Busting out 16 more /8s only delays the IPv4 endgame by about a year.
Actually, if last year's consumption is any indicator, it's more like 10 months and given the accelerating consumption of IPv4 overall, I'd say less than 9 is not unlikely. I'm betting you're talking about more than 9 months to get the software and reachability issues resolved. Owen