On Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 4:16 AM Eliot Lear <lear@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@herrin.us https://bill.herrin.us/