On Fri, Oct 19, 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
So is this a statement that Cisco is volunteering to provide free binary patches for its entire product line? Including the really old stuff that happens to be floating around out there and still in use?
Considering there's forklift upgrades required to support changes in technology anyway, I see this as not a problem. People can choose if they'd like to use that space. People -chose- to use some new IP space which had once been bogon space and then spent quite a bit of time figuring out why the hell customers couldn't reach the general internet. People adapted.
The day you guys release a set of free binary patches for all your previous products, including stuff like the old Compatible Systems line, old Cisco gear like the 2500, and old Linksys products, then I'll be happy to concede that I could be wrong and that vendors might actually make it possible for IPv4-240+ to be usable.
You know, Cisco do release updates to old IOS software periodically. ISTR seeing a Cisco 2500 IOS update -this year-. Yup: c2500-is-l.123-23.bin 16 16 25-JUL-2007 Its so not out of the realm of possibility Cisco, just as an example of one vendor of $LOTS, would do a software rebuild run just for this particular issue. All IETF "has to do" is possibly reclassify 240/4 from "experimental/future use" to "experimental unicast space" to satisfy the vendors that would block on 240/4 being routable and satisfy those who are worried that putting it on the public internet is bad (and I'm one of them for now); then let the market decide what they want to do. Adrian