nanog mailing list archives
Re: legacy /8
From: Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2010 15:46:55 -0700
On Apr 2, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
Jeroen van Aart writes:Cutler James R wrote:I also just got a fresh box of popcorn. I will sit by and waitI honestly am not trying to be a troll. It's just everytime I glance over the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry I feel rather annoyed about all those /8s that were assigned back in the day without apparently realising we might run out. It was explained to me that many companies with /8s use it for their internal network and migrating to 10/8 instead is a major pain.You know, I've felt the same irritation before, but one thing I am wondering and perhaps some folks around here have been around long enough to know - what was the original thinking behind doing those /8s?
The original thinking was based on an environment where the Internet was expected to consist only of a few corporate entities providing services and products to research institutions and the government. There was no WWW, no browsers, and Windows couldn't even spell TCP/IP at the time. The expectation was that those /8s would be subnetted into vast arrays of "Class C" sized chunks and that subnets within a given /8 all had to be the same size (this used to be necessary to keep RIP happy and every machine participating in RIP routing had to have an /etc/netmasks (or equivalent) table that tracked "THE" subnet mask for each natural prefix). Sure, a /8 is a lot of addresses in today's world. However, back then, it was much like a /48 today. Just a way to give someone 65,500+ subnets (for any given X/8, then X.0/16, X.255/16, X.Y.0/24, X.Y.255/24 were unusable in these days).
I understand that they were A classes and assigned to large companies, etc. but was it just not believed there would be more than 126(-ish) of these entities at the time? Or was it thought we would move on to larger address space before we did? Or was it that things were just more free-flowing back in the day? Why were A classes even created? RFC 791 at least doesn't seem to provide much insight as to the 'whys'. - Andrew
It was thought that we would not have nearly so many people connected to the internet. It was expected that most things connecting to the internet would be minicomputers and mainframes. Owen
Current thread:
- Re: legacy /8, (continued)
- Re: legacy /8 Owen DeLong (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Charles N Wyble (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 jim deleskie (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Larry Sheldon (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Chris Grundemann (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Owen DeLong (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Lamar Owen (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Owen DeLong (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Cutler James R (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Jeroen van Aart (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Andrew Gray (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Owen DeLong (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 bmanning (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Cutler James R (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Jeroen van Aart (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Jim Burwell (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Jeffrey Lyon (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Leen Besselink (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 Roland Perry (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 Zaid Ali (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 William Warren (Apr 11)
- Re: legacy /8 Jeroen van Aart (Apr 02)