[100178] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 240/4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Sprunk)
Fri Oct 19 00:40:46 2007
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>
To: "Pekka Savola" <pekkas@netcore.fi>
Cc: "North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:21:14 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Thus spake "Pekka Savola" <pekkas@netcore.fi>
> The operators who want to do something private with this space don't need
> the IETF or IANA approval to do so. So they should just go
> ahead and do it. If they can manage to get it to work, and live to tell
> about it, maybe we can consider that sufficient proof that we can start
> thinking about reclassification.
There are, fortunately, a number of vendors that don't like to go against
existing RFCs. We're one of them. Regardless of customer demand, I will
block any attempt inside our development group to allow 240/4 until the IETF
reclassifies it from experimental to unicast address space. Note that doing
that would _not_ automatically imply that the IETF would direct IANA to
delegate that space to the RIRs; the IETF could direct IANA to mark one /8
as private and the rest reserved. Releasing the rest to the RIRs shouldn't
be done until it is observed that a non-trivial number of hosts on the
public network support it -- if that ever happens.
I can see cases for using 240/4 on private networks where one has more
control over patches getting deployed (or is using OSes one can patch
themselves or bully vendors to patch), but that's all that's worth
discussing now. Short of someone from Microsoft indicating they'd post a
patch on Windows Update for Vista, XP, and possibly earlier systems, any
discussion of _when_ these addresses _might_ be usable on a public network
is a waste of bits.
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking