John Curran wrote:
On Nov 21, 2022, at 7:18 PM, Joe Maimon <jmai...@jmaimon.com> wrote:
… Further, presentment of options in this fashion presumes that we
have some ability to control or decide how engineering efforts across
the entirety of the internet should be spent.
Joe -
In the snippet above you allude to a very important aspect of the
Internet that is rather germane to this discussion – ii.e. that we
really don’t really have any "ability to control or decide how
engineering efforts across the entirety of the internet should be
spent” –, but then you don’t really work through what that fact means
for realistic outcomes of class E space re-utilization…
True
As you alluded to, we really don’t have any "ability to control or
decide how engineering efforts across the entirety of the internet
should be spent”, and the practical implications of this fact is that
there will always be many devices out there in production that will
not pass IP packets with class E addresses in them… (just as there’s
always going to be some devices, somewhere that don’t know about IPv6.)
To what extent will this be? And to what extent could it have been had
this been seriously considered dozen+ years ago? We wont really know
until we can get serious about it.
Of course, the difference is that with IPv6 we can attempt a
connection and then fall back to IPv4, and further that devices out
there either support and are configured for IPv6 routing, or they are
not - networks rather quickly learn not to announce (via routing &
DNS) IPv6 connectivity for devices without it actually being in place
and operational or having solid IPv4 fall-back and relying fast
fallback/happy eyeballs.
This is a very fair point. Or perhaps we can have reverse happy eyeballs
for IPv4 fallling back to sub-optimal auto-tunneled IPv6?
With your using repurposed class E address space in the headers, your
customers with such addresses are rather unlikely to ever know why a
connection won’t establish – or why existing connections sometime fail
mid-stream – as it only takes a single non-conforming device along the
ever-changing path through any number of network operators to
resulting in the silent drop of that packet.
I am not that sure about silent, presumably traceroute will be just as
(un)usable.
That may (or may not) lead to you experiencing what you consider
reasonable support costs for your customers, but as we all know,
everyone else has customers who are the other ends of those
connections who will call their ISP’s customer support line trying to
figure out why they can’t get your customer (or can only get there
intermittently) – so it appears that your proposed use of de-reserved
and repurposed class E space has some real interesting implications
about imputed support burdens on everyone else – if indeed the
intended use case is includes providing connectivity to the public
Internet.
If you’re not proposing public Internet use, and rather just within
your own administrative domain, then feel free to do – talk to your
vendors, get them to support it, and turn it on. As you already noted,
we really don’t centrally decide how everyone runs their own network –
so using it locally is fine since it doesn’t presume others will
diagnose connection problems with your customer traffic that quite
reasonably is categorized as invalid.
Thanks,
/John
p.s. Disclaimer: my views alone. Note: contents may be hot - use
caution when opening.
Right now the gossiped growing use of 240/4 in private and non
standardized fashions jeopardizes any potential use of it just as much
as the factors you describe.
In either event, my main point of contention is in the lack of
willingness for serious and prudent consideration. Such as along the
lines of what you have brought up.
So thank you.
Best,
Joe