At 7:15 PM 1/30/95, Jon Postel wrote:

Excuse me.

This seems brain dead. I think the intent of 1597 was to say here are some numbers you can go play with privately. Since they are private they should never appear on the public Internet, anywhere, ever. If any router on the public Internet sees a packet to (or from) a 1597 network it can throw it in the bit bucket and forget it.

It would be possible for some private experiment to use some 1597 addresses to exchange packets over a "wire". Such a wire could be implemented by some pretty complicated arrangements with conventional public Internet service providers -- but any packets with 1597 addresses would have to be encapsulated inside packets with acceptable addresses for the public Internet to go through public Internet exchange points.

RFC1597 addresses are those addresses whose routes do not have to be accepted from anything outside of the "local" scope. If you consider "local" to be your site, then great. If I consider "local" to be my network infrastructure (excluding your renegade site :-) that's also fine. Just as a site's network is "private" (and hence can use RFC1597 addresses), a provider's infrastructure is also "private" for those packets which do not leave their network. /John