250M-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released

It’s not going to happen. Plenty of routers and other equipment are hardcoded to not route to those addresses. Any time spent rectifying this is time wasted on just adopting IPv6.<p>Ping 240.whatever.whatever.whatever from Windows. You just can’t. General failure.<p>And Windows is not the exception here.<p>They can lobby all they want, all the effort is going to be in vain. Imagine having to debug a problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0&#x2F;4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination. It’d be a nightmare and “get better networking gear” might not even be a solution, because their ISPs routers could also be doing that.<p>This proposal is provably worse than just adopting IPv6, because when IPv6 works, it just works. This? This would fragment the IPv4 internet with undefined behaviour.<p>If they really want more v4 space, they should advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use. And they have a lot of v4 space. But that’s also not going to happen, and one of the reasons why not would be similar. A lot of people are actually squatting on DoD space in their internal networks if they run out of 10&#x2F;8.

I remember the days when theregister could be considered good newsource.<p>Did the author need to crank out an &quot;article&quot; before the weekend?<p>This has been talked about for decades. It&#x27;s not going to happen. The entire range is unusable at the networking core level, even if you magically had an OS that accepted it.<p>You can&#x27;t tweak IPv4 any more. Accept the fact that while IPv6 may seem scary to some, it&#x27;s the way we _must_ move.<p>Networking is not scary, learn it.

This again? Just use v6, it’s not that hard.

Technically, they <i>could</i>¹ be released – but it wouldn’t help! Even a &#x2F;4 is a drop in the bucket the way allocations were accelerating up until the addresses ran out. They’d quickly run out <i>again</i>, and we’d be back to where we started. Except now with additional problems for everybody unable to use the new addresses.<p>If you have to exchange old equipment <i>anyway</i>, it’s better to use the new equipment to simply switch to IPv6.<p>1. With horrible consequences, admittedly.

I attended a university which DHCP&#x27;d unique, public-facing IPs to every device on the network. Although this requires tens-of-thousands of unique global IPs, the university only utilizes a small percentage of their allocated IP range. Having worked in the IT dept during school, I know it would have been a nightmare to attempt merging ours with another IP-range.<p>Back in 2006 I gave a presentation on IPv4 end-of-life, when it was then predicted IPv6 would be entirely necessary by 2020 (i.e. that IPv4 would die out by then). This explainer&#x2F;demo, almost two decades ago, got me a job offer... and yet two decades later I still don&#x27;t use IPv6, myself!

Nice, they will be released, so the blocks can be bought by AWS, etc extractring rents for a long time ... Why don&#x27;t we switch to ipv6.

If they are, I kinda hope that I could get my hands on one. Or a few.

Some answers from my perspective:<p>240&#x2F;4 is already useful in sdns, vpns, and networks like AWS as a hop along the way. Merely moving it on the IETF&#x2F;IANA ledger from reserved to unicast would recognize reality since 2008. It is hilarious how hard that has been.<p>Universal connectivity need not be a goal - can you imagine a portion of the internet completely immune from 30+ years of windows borne worms and viruses? :)<p>240&#x2F;4 support in modern windows is a patch tuesday away which I would hope happen after it is moved from one side of the ledger to the other, officially. It (and 0&#x2F;8) saves nanoseconds.<p>In doing these patches we noticed that NO IoT OS actually did the 240&#x2F;4 or 0&#x2F;8 check, and in deleting the checks for it in Linux, etc, 5 and 16 years ago, the internet did not melt down.<p>I see a lot of resentment from the router community that bemoans the extra work it will take to block these addresses, when if they don´t bother, nothing will change. Deleting code and acls for it, will actually speed things up.<p>The flack I took for the 0&#x2F;8 patches from thousands of people and the 3 weeks it took to patch that out of everything were outweighed in terms of saving nanoseconds on every packet the first weekend that kernel deployed. 5+ years ago in the case of 0&#x2F;8. Enforcing a stupid policy for decades for no reason seems silly. 0&#x2F;8 should have been reclaimed in 1986.<p>As for what doesn´t work, who cares? Enough networks do already to make the 240&#x2F;4 space usable. However AWS and google and perhaps others squatting on it!? and turning it into RFC1918 space, was certainly not my intent - I had thought that these addresses should be added to the global internet, for all mankind. Jon Postel would be spinning in his grave if he saw this abuse of this space.<p>I had delusions of setting up 255&#x2F;8 (the most junky space available, much like 2.4ghz was for wifi) as a test, as a place to innovate, as a place to perhaps perfect udp-lite natting, and other protocols, within the open source community.<p>Lastly, everybody misses the most important draft of all, finally retiring the .0 broadcast idea (with no users since 1986) which will free up oodles of real world IPv4 address space. Most of that work is already done, it would take very little to finish it. Why is it so hard to get people to pay attention to that? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address-05.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-...</a><p>IPv6 also has a stupid idea about the zeroth address, only implemented in a few places that needs to be depreciated, which would shrink a lot of routing tables.