Freeing Up of Hundreds of Millions of IPv4 Addresses Mooted
'Work is afoot to free up several internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address ranges which have been unroutable as reserved, invalid or used for loopback networks since the 1980s. Reader Bismillah shares a report: Seth Schoen, who co-founded the free transport layer security digital certificate provider Let's Encrypt is working on an IPv4 clean-up project that would take address currently not routed on the public Internet, and make them generally usable. Presenting on the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), Schoen said decisions taken during the 1980s to keep several IPv4 address ranges as "special", has led to a substantial amount of numbering resources going to waste. This "even though the reasons behind the those decisions has not been borne out," Schoen said. Taking the 240/4, 0/8, 127/8, 225/8-232/8 ranges, and making them available as ordinary unicast numbering resources for networks would add some 419 million IPv4 addresses. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of 32-bit IPv4 addresses has become scarce, with some regional registries being unable to allocate additional blocks to networks. The scarcity has caused IPv4 address hoarding, high prices for sub-allocations and even fraud to get more space.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/05/31/1958213 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Wed, 1 Jun 2022 15:32:05 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Taking the ... 127/8 ... ranges, and making them available as ordinary unicast numbering resources ...'
Oh, wow. Did you know that the entire range of over 16 million 127.x.x.x addresses are all (currently) considered “loopback” ones that point back to your machine? Yes, it does seem an incredible and pointless waste. Sure, people normally use 127.0.0.1. I just wonder how many have picked others in that range, just for the fun of it, and are going to have their setups broken if/when this goes ahead ...
On Wed, 1 Jun 2022, at 16:27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
Did you know that the entire range of over 16 million 127.x.x.x addresses are all (currently) considered “loopback” ones that point back to your machine?
Sure, people normally use 127.0.0.1. I just wonder how many have picked others in that range, just for the fun of it, and are going to have their setups broken if/when this goes ahead ...
I've been a network engineer for years, and I never realised that whole /8 was a loopback space! I feel like a goose even admitting it; just one of those absurd things that you miss, I guess. I've definitely seen 127.0.1.1 and 127.0.0.2 in use... so three out of those 16 million are accounted for... E -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es
On 1/06/22 17:16, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:32:50 +1200, Eric Light wrote:
I've definitely seen 127.0.1.1 and 127.0.0.2 in use...
I, too, have seen 127.0.0.2, at least. Never understood why.
systemd's resolver also listens on 127.0.0.53:53. This will ensure it avoids any other resolver, listening on only localhost. I read that having the local name on 127.0.0.2 (or …1.1) helped by having the host "one IP away". I vaguely recall in the dim past that having the hostname on a separate IP than "loopback" (127.0.0.1) helped some software (but I've lost the full recollection and my google-fu is lacking…) When I first read the article, I did ponder why attempt to free up IPv4, instead of looking at IPv6. 30+years ago, I recall software having issues where it hadn't caught up with CIDR - is it likely that opening up 127/8, multicast ranges et al. is going to expose assumptions made in those routers that haven't been updated in a long time?
On Thu, 2 Jun 2022 11:01:53 +0000, Warren Boyd wrote:
systemd's resolver also listens on 127.0.0.53:53. This will ensure it avoids any other resolver, listening on only localhost.
You know, I didn’t believe it, but you can indeed have multiple listeners on the same port, just using different addresses in the loopback range. So having multiple loopback addresses isn’t *completely* pointless. But we probably don’t need 16 million of them ...
When I first read the article, I did ponder why attempt to free up IPv4, instead of looking at IPv6.
IPv6 adoption continues, but at a pace too slow for some. (I did wonder why, since they were going to break things anyway, they didn’t go for 32-bit port numbers...) According to this article <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly/>, back when there were still unused IPv4 addresses available to allocate, they were being used up at the rate of 200 million per year. So a new /8 block is only going to postpone the inevitable by about a month.
participants (4)
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Eric Light -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann -
Warren Boyd