[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[Andrew G. Malis]

Dave,

NAT/private address spaces was as important as CIDR to allow the Internet
to keep growing.

CIDR came first. By mid-to-late 1992, it was clear that we were running out
of class A and B network numbers.  The resulting CIDR work progressed quite
rapidly, and the RFCs were published in September 93.

CIDR allowed the allocation of lots of new more appropriately sized network
numbers. But that only exacerbated another problem, the explosion of the
global routing table size, which was putting a real strain on the backbone
routers' memory table size and routing processing capacity.

That lead to RFC 1597 in March of 1994, which defined class A, B, and C
private address spaces - our now familiar net 10, 192.168.X, and so on (it
was later updated and replaced by the more famous RFC 1918). That was
quickly followed by NAT (RFC 1631), published that following May.

The combination of CIDR, private address spaces, and NAT took a lot of
pressure off of the IPv4 address space exhaustion and routing table growth
problems.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Cheers,
Andy




On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 2:17 PM Dave Taht <dave at taht.net> wrote:

>
> The 0.0.0.0 thread has been fascinating and I now have more to read
> than I ever imagined I would. Moving sideways...
>
> So, it seems obvious that address size problems plagued the arpanet
> and earlier versions of IP. When did the writing show up on the wall
> that the classful design wasn't working, and secondly that 32 bits
> wasn't enough?
>
> As near as I can tell, this netnews exchange
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20030718205943/http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk:80/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8813.mm.www/0178.html
>
> ultimately resulted in CIDR and the next message, kicked off IPv6 - for
> the toasters!
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20030913113707/http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8813.mm.www/0237.html
>
> Somewhere also in this fascinating month of internet history (morris
> worm days) someone suggested starting to use the class-e space, with no
> replies.... Were there proposals to use this as an extension of some sort?
>
> Anyway it seems to me (in retrospect) that everybody *knew* 32 bits
> wasn't enough even going back as far as 1981 (loved hearing about how
> tcp went from v2 to v4) ?) but it didn't become
> recognized as a serious problem til about this era. ?
>
> >
> > I personally (in my current naive state of mind) would like to see
> > daemons daemons source traffic from any of the other 65,535 ports
> > excluding than the destination port as a possible source port.
>
> IANA suggests a smaller ephemeral port range than what linux uses.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeral_port
>
> Given the profusion of NAT-like nasty things like CGNs and DS-lite and
> the rise of QUIC I would favor extending the ephemeral port range as far
> as possible.
>
> >
> > Aside:  Why is port 0 special?  }:-)
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