Nick Hilliard wrote:
John Gilmore wrote on 18/11/2021 19:37:
There will be no future free-for-all that burns through 300 million
IPv4 addresses in 4 months.
this is correct not necessarily because of the reasons you state, but
because all the RIRs have changed their ipv4 allocation policies to
policies which assume complete or near-complete depletion of the
available pools, rather than policies which allocate / assign on the
basis of stated requirement. For sure, organisations were previously
requesting more than they needed, but if stated-requirement were
reinstituted as a policy basis, the address space would disappear in a
flash.
I think it more likely that organizations will treat new space like they
do their reclaimed/returned allocations right now. We are not going
back. IPv4 only becomes plentiful again upon obsolescence.
Need is elastic based upon general availability of supply. To say it
differently, organizations were requesting more than than they
absolutely required to get by. And that was ok, because there was no
reason to require them to twist themselves into engineering pretzels
when IPv4 was freely available.
Simple example, back in the day you could choose to deploy a T1 customer
with a public /30 and routed /29 and that would have easily met needs
requirements.
On the other hand, you could also deploy the same customer with
unnumbered or private /30 and routed to loopback public /32.
The point remains that 127/8, 0/8, 240/4 are problematic to
debogonise, and are not going to make a dramatic impact to the
availability of ipv4 addresses in the longer term. Same with using the
lowest ip address in a network block. Nice idea, but 30 years late.
There's no problem implementing these ideas in code and quietly using
the address space in private contexts.
Nick
Right or wrong, it would be nice to remove any impediment to the effort
absent justifiable document-able and insurmountable reason why the space
should NOT be usable.
And those impediments manifest themselves even for quietly using the
address space in private contexts.
Also, the 30 intervening years have dramatically upped the stakes in
terms of RoI.
I suggest considering these proposals in the light that IPv4 may be
obsolete in a decade. And maybe not.
If it is obsolete, whats the harm?
And if it not, the benefits are clearer than ever.
Joe