Re: Class D addresses? was: Redploying most of 127/8 as unicast public

[Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>]

On 11/20/21 11:41 AM, Jay Hennigan wrote:
> On 11/20/21 11:01, Michael Thomas wrote:
>
> > There is just as big a block of addresses with class D addresses for 
> > broadcast. Is broadcast really even a thing these days? I know tons 
> > of work went into it, but it always seemed that brute force and 
> > ignorance won out using unicast. Even if it has some niche uses, I 
> > seriously doubt that it needs 400M addresses. If you wanted to 
> > reclaim ipv4 addresses it seems that class D and class E would be a 
> > much better target than loopback.
>
> It's multicast, not broadcast. A very small chunk is used by some 
> routing protocols and it has uses in several streaming applications, 
> but indeed it's much larger than it practically needs to be.
>
> However, IMNSHO, all of these proposals if adopted are really just 
> going to make a few people richer in the short term after their 
> adoption and will not do anything significant to solve the problem of 
> IPv4 exhaustion long-term.
Yeah, sorry brain fart. I'm mostly in the camp of just getting on with 
it with ipv6, but starving the beast doesn't have a great track record. 
We are talking about 20% of the address space that's being wasted so 
it's not nothing.

Mike