On Nov 21, 2021, at 1:20 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 4:16 AM Eliot Lear <lear at ofcourseimright.com> wrote:
In 2008, Vince Fuller, Dave Meyer, and I put together
draft-fuller-240space, and we presented it to the IETF. There were
definitely people who thought we should just try to get to v6, but what
really stopped us was a point that Dave Thaler made: unintended impact
on non-participating devices, and in particular CPE/consumer firewall
gear, and at the time there were  serious concerns about some endpoint
systems as well.  Back then it might have been possible to use the space
as part of an SP interior, but no SP demonstrated any interest at the
time, because it would have amounted to an additional transition.

Hi Eliot,

I wasn't in the working group so I'll take your word for it. Something
rather different happened later when folks on NANOG discovered that
the IETF had considered and abandoned the idea. Opinion coalesced into
two core groups:

Group 1: Shut up and use IPv6. We don't want the IETF or vendors
distracted from that effort with improvements to IPv4. Mumble mumble
titanic deck chairs harrumph.

Group 2: Why is the IETF being so myopic? We're likely to need more
IPv4 addresses, 240/4 is untouched, and this sort of change has a long
lead time. Mumble mumble heads up tailpipes harrumph.


More than a decade later, the "titantic" is shockingly still afloat
and it would be strikingly useful if there were a mostly working /4 of
IP addresses we could argue about how best to employ.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


--
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/


I agree, generally speaking.  IMO, it’s unfortunate that these addresses are being held in “limbo” while these debates go on.  I’m not complaining about the debates per se, but the longer we go without resolution, these addresses can’t be put to any (documented) use.

There’s background information available that might be helpful to those who haven’t yet seen it:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/slides-70-intarea-4/ (links to the draft-fuller-240space slides from IETF 70)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/minutes-70-intarea/ (IETF 70 INTAREA meeting minutes)
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2007-October/thread.html (NANOG October 2007 mail archives, containing links to the “240/4” thread)
https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/240-e/ (the 240-e archives)
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/int-area/ (IETF INTAREA archives, containing comments on the 240space draft and related issues, roughly in the same time frame as in the previous links)

—gregbo