[124599] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: legacy /8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Fri Apr 2 19:06:28 2010
From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
In-Reply-To: <courier.000000004BB671E2.00007B21@blargh.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2010 15:46:55 -0700
To: Andrew Gray <3356@blargh.com>
Cc: NANOG List <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Apr 2, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> Jeroen van Aart writes:=20
>> Cutler James R wrote:
>>> I also just got a fresh box of popcorn. I will sit by and wait
>> I honestly am not trying to be a troll. It's just everytime I glance =
over the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry I feel rather annoyed about =
all those /8s that were assigned back in the day without apparently =
realising we might run out. It was explained to me that many companies =
with /8s use it for their internal network and migrating to 10/8 instead =
is a major pain.
>=20
> You know, I've felt the same irritation before, but one thing I am =
wondering and perhaps some folks around here have been around long =
enough to know - what was the original thinking behind doing those /8s?=20=
The original thinking was based on an environment where the Internet was =
expected to consist only of a few corporate entities providing services =
and products to research institutions and the government. There was no =
WWW, no browsers, and Windows couldn't even spell TCP/IP at the time.
The expectation was that those /8s would be subnetted into vast arrays =
of "Class C" sized chunks and that subnets within a given /8 all had to =
be the same size (this used to be necessary to keep RIP happy and every =
machine participating in RIP routing had to have an /etc/netmasks (or =
equivalent) table that tracked "THE" subnet mask for each natural =
prefix).
Sure, a /8 is a lot of addresses in today's world. However, back then, =
it was much like a /48 today. Just a way to give someone 65,500+ subnets =
(for any given X/8, then X.0/16, X.255/16, X.Y.0/24, X.Y.255/24 were =
unusable in these days).
> I understand that they were A classes and assigned to large companies, =
etc. but was it just not believed there would be more than 126(-ish) of =
these entities at the time? Or was it thought we would move on to =
larger address space before we did? Or was it that things were just =
more free-flowing back in the day? Why were A classes even created? =
RFC 791 at least doesn't seem to provide much insight as to the 'whys'.=20=
> - Andrew
It was thought that we would not have nearly so many people connected to =
the internet. It was expected that most things connecting to the =
internet would be minicomputers and mainframes.
Owen
