Dave Taht <dave.t...@gmail.com> writes: > The longstanding prohibition against using 0.0.0.0/8 dates back > to two issues with the early internet. > > There was an interoperability problem with BSD 4.2 in 1984, fixed in > BSD 4.3 in 1986. BSD 4.2 has long since been retired. > > Secondly, addresses of the form 0.x.y.z were initially defined only as > a source address in an ICMP datagram, indicating "node number x.y.z on > this IPv4 network", by nodes that know their address on their local > network, but do not yet know their network prefix, in RFC0792 (page > 19). This usage of 0.x.y.z was later repealed in RFC1122 (section > 3.2.2.7), because the original ICMP-based mechanism for learning the > network prefix was unworkable on many networks such as Ethernet (which > have longer addresses that would not fit into the 24 "node number" > bits). Modern networks use reverse ARP (RFC0903) or BOOTP (RFC0951) > or DHCP (RFC2131) to find their full 32-bit address and CIDR netmask > (and other parameters such as default gateways). 0.x.y.z has had > 16,777,215 addresses in 0.0.0.0/8 space left unused and reserved for > future use, since 1989. > > This patch allows for these 16m new IPv4 addresses to appear within > a box or on the wire. Layer 2 switches don't care. > > 0.0.0.0/32 is still prohibited, of course. > > Signed-off-by: Dave Taht <dave.t...@gmail.com>
Well, I see no reason why we shouldn't allow this. Acked-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <t...@redhat.com>
