Subject: Re: Last Call: draft-iana-rfc3330bis (Special Use IPv4 Addresses) to Informational RFC

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:32:34 +0100

I have one suggestion for draft-iana-rfc3330bis (not wearing any
hats):

I think it would be useful to have more addresses for use in
documentation and examples, in addition to the current 192.0.2.0/24.
Although it's naturally possible to split 192.0.2.0/24 to smaller
pieces (e.g., two /25s or four /26s) when writing examples, those
pieces look very much alike, and that hurts the readability and
clarity of the examples.

I've encountered this myself when e.g. writing the examples for RFC
4718, and I have seen the same situation in other documents, too.

It would be nice if we had, say, two additional blocks that are 
easily visually distinguishable (that is, start with something 
else than "192").

Best regards,
Pasi

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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:20:13 -0700

>easily visually distinguishable (that is, start with something

Quite right. We have heard that some less-clued developers got confused about whether or not two addresses in examples *had* to be in the same /24. We all understand that, but some of them don't, particularly the ones whose professors in their networking class still lecture on CIDR.

It will not really hasten the demise of IPv4 for IANA to reserve one non-private /24 for a second example space from the next allocation that it makes to an RIR.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:40:48 -0400

--On Sunday, March 29, 2009 09:20 -0700 Paul Hoffman
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> It will not really hasten the demise of IPv4 for IANA to
> reserve one non-private /24 for a second example space from
> the next allocation that it makes to an RIR.

Or to ask one of the RIRs (probably ARIN for historical reasons)
to return one or two swamp /24s that were previously returned to
them to IANA for this purpose.  There are, I gather, a few of
those addresses around and, since they cannot be allocated to
new applicants under current procedures, returning them for this
use would seem utterly harmless without even raising IPv4 space
exhaustion issues.

     john