[ih] Class-E extensions?

[Dave Taht]

Leo Vegoda <leo at vegoda.org> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 11:30 AM Dave Taht <dave at taht.net> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> 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?
>
> I am aware of these two I-Ds, which looked at making use of that space:
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fuller-240space-02
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wilson-class-e-02
>
> I believe the main reason they did not progress was that the vast
> majority of deployed devices would barf at those addresses, which
> would raise support costs for network operators beyond those incurred
> by other approaches to providing continued IPv4 connectivity.

Depends on your definition of "barf". If you mean "explodes on contact",
noo.. If you mean "won't assign, can't connect", that is true, still,
today... for windows, which is now a minority OS. Linux, IOS, BSD, OSX
all seem to support 240/4 as globally routable unicast since vince
fuller's draft in 08, IOT devices mostly only check for IN_MULTICAST and
treat everything else as a valid IP address. The last (minor) fix for
240/4 went into linux 4.20 and openwrt last december.

Anyway this verges on discussing my pending I-D, and I'm mostly here for
the history... given all the documents I've now read about various
address extensions for various stacks, someone *must* have seriously
proposed something like a 64 bit address extension out of the 240/4
space in the 1990-1997 timeframe? Or did it lie completely fallow until
those two drafts above?