legacy /8

[dwhite at olp.net (Dan White)]

On 03/04/10?23:11?-0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>With all that bitching about IPv6 how come nobody wrote an RFC for a very 
>simple solution to the IPv4 address exhaustion problem:

+1 years.

>Step 1: specify an IP option for extra "low order" bits of source & 
>destination address.  Add handling of these to the popular OSes.

+5 years.

>Step 2: make NATs which directly connect extended addresses but also NAT 
>them to non-extended external IPs.
>
>Step 3: leave backones unchanged.  Gradually reduce size of allocated 
>blocks forcing people to NAT as above.

Never.

>Step 4: watch people migrating their apps to extended addresses to avoid 
>dealing with NAT bogosity and resulting tech support calls & costs.

+10 years.

>Step 5: remove NATs.

This is a good example of why patching v4 or trying to maintain backwards
compatibility is not practical.

-- 
Dan White