Surely something from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses could be repurposed?

Why? It would be to the benefit of relatively few and be an enormous technical problem for decades for everyone. If we did this, the IPv4 addresses would run out again after a few months at most, leaving us all in the same position we are in today, but also with a huge technical problem of fixing all the old devices which had these now-repurposed networks hardcoded.

If you are fine with doing the work of obsoleting old equipment, then just start using IPv6.

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sgjohnson 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No. It will take 10 years for everyone to update their router configuration/software to treat the new “formely-reserved” addresses as global unicast. There’s no point in doing that whatsoever. That effort would be spent much better by adopting IPv6.

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yardstick 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

240/4 can be hijacked/used as private IP space currently by a lot of devices. I think Windows might be the hold out. But for internal routing and IoT it’s very useful. Can never be used as publicly routable space.

I’d like to see it added to the official list of private space alongside RFC1918.

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globular-toast 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8, but I suppose it looks even cooler too those who know and find such things cool.

Does Windoze prevent you from using certain IPv4 addresses?

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throw0101b 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8

Large organizations have moved to IPv6 because they, and everyone else, are using 10/8, and so when mergers and acquisitions happen trying to connect the networks together becomes a nightmare.

See this talk from Wells Fargo as an example:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTWjNUb4H4

	▲	yardstick 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The pain of merging acquired company networks cannot be overstated! IPv6 can help, but in my experience there's just soo much old IPv4 tech that no one is prepared to migrate to IPv6.

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Hikikomori 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Aws sized companies, we also use them in aws. And no doesn't work on windows.

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mrbluecoat 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast... is a nice historical overview of 240/4

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teaearlgraycold 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Holy cow. Didn’t realize there is an entire /4 reserved for future use.