History of 127/8 as localhost/loopback addresses (2021)
elists.isoc.org
elists.isoc.org
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminalIMP...
It went something like @HOST #, @SEND TO SOCKET #, @RECEIVE FROM SOCKET #, @PROTOCOL BOTH, making sure the sockets were different parity so as not to violate the Anita Bryant clause with homosocketuality:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813
You could also add the octal device port number of any other TIP user on your same TIP after the @ and before the command, to execute those commands on their session. (See page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters".) BBN wrote such great documentation and would mail copies of it for free to anyone who asked (that's how I got mine), you couldn't even call it security by obscurity!
We’re just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later, the band-aid has got to come off. ~4 billion IP addresses are simply not enough for ~8 billion people.
So maybe we should just refuse to pile on more hacks and force the ISPs to get off their ass and upgrade their networks.
that logic has been hard-coded inside every OS and vast amounts of software for 30+ years
and to gain less than 0.8%?
they'd do better targeting the reserved multicast range
Ha. Ha. Ha.
> that logic has been hard-coded inside
The thing is what some things are literally hardcoded. I have a whole bunch of network gear circa 2010 in production.
It does support IPv6, but for the most part it is extremely rudimentary. What do you want from a box what implements SSH by running a telnet session over a no-auth SSH session?
And while I can run the latest Windows/Linux/Whatever on my server gear, the network gear is not that simple to upgrade.
I ran into this 10 years ago. I decided to roll out IPv6 to clients. Router docs said it was supported. Then I watched CPU usage peg because every packet hit the CPU. Turns out it was implemented in software; no ASIC support. Was quite the buzz kill.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast...
Trying to see the most charitable position here - is there an aspect in which redefining 127/8 to 127/16 across billions of devices is actually feasible?
Imagine trying to get the same people to upgrade router firmware...... no chance
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/mqfy9a/just_got_our_ne...
Earlier versions of cable modems had flaws that allowed consumers to push configs on the ethernet port and uncap their cable modems and gain higher speeds than they had paid for.
"Thank you for upgrading your service to our VVVIP Price Tier! Your first three months as a VVVIP customer is 50% off..."
They did, but the overhead at the time was high. And they generally didn't peruse unless you were causing trouble....or slipped up on OPSEC.
Cable ISP network security back in the day was horrid. SNMP string would get leaked. With that you could snmpwalk the entire node you were on. It was amusing.
There are so many other devices out there that are required for this change to work, it is insane to think it could be done.
Which is why there are technical standards for the ISP to do it from their end:
> Technical Report 069 (TR-069) is a technical specification of the Broadband Forum that defines an application layer protocol for remote management and provisioning of customer-premises equipment (CPE) connected to an Internet Protocol (IP) network. TR-069 uses the CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) which provides support functions for auto-configuration, software or firmware image management, software module management, status and performance managements, and diagnostics.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069
(At least on ISP-issued CPE.)
Expires: 12 May 2022
Expires: 8 September 2022IPv6 is now supported in the vast majority of operating systems and routers and firewalls. It’s now down to the carriers/ISPs to configure their networks to use it.
Ie the IPv4 issue is a programming issue, while the IPv6 issue is an administration/configuration issue.
Ie Ciscos software engineers aren’t the ones holding back your ISP from turning on IPv6. Cisco engineers aren’t toiling away adding much needed missing IPv6 features.
Unless I’ve missed something?
And if that ISP happens to be one of those that decided that their core competency is marketing, and outsourced everything else, including network engineering... Well, than they view IPv6 as something expensive/risky (in project costs) in addition to useless.
This actually pisses me off enormously.
It’s not that there’s low (or no) demand, it’s that people are not being recorded as having voiced this concern.
I can say for certain that over the last ten years when ISPs call to upsell their packages I always respond with “I’m not going to upgrade unless it gives me ipv6”. When talking to new ISPs I always ask if they support ipv6 and if not: when.
The answer is always “it’s not on the roadmap, we don’t have any people requesting this”- the follow up I usually ask is “are you going to write down anywhere that I am requesting this? Because others could say the same” and they always say that they won’t record my interest, even though it costs them an upsell or a sale.
So, I figured maybe I’m weird, maybe I am the only one. I have no way of knowing.
Except; I met someone else who also does this- we have the same ISP and they told him: “nobody has ever asked for this” which is categorically untrue since I have asked for this.
We’re being gaslit by the industry.
Yeah, maybe some ISPs should be listening to their customers more (I heard tales of ISPs in the US), but in this they're not wrong: consumer demand really is low.
I've switched between IPv6-connected and IPv4-only quite a few times over the last 20 years due to moving to different countries with different options and was a fairly "early adopter" back in the day with the tunnels XS4ALL had, and even as a technical person I can't say I ever noticed the difference.
you can ask the same question about IPv4 and get same answers.
I think this elides the point really.
People don't know when an issue is because of ipv4, for a good example: network issues in online video games are often caused by being unable to NAT punch, lag can also be because connection information is relayed by some far away STUN server. Same with in-game voice chat.
Usually you need to set port forwards to make games work properly.
In the event of GCNAT a customer has no possible recourse.
But nobody understands the issue is largely because of IPv4, they just assume that's how it is, and assume the same issue would exist with IPv6
Larger providers (zoom, apple/facetime, twitch, ...) just set up relay servers and avoid p2p altogether - which cost money, increase latency/jitter, and decrease privacy. You can argue all of that are hidden costs of sticking to IPv4 for longer than we should have.
But ask auto-mechanics, and hoo boy, will there be opinions.
It’s worse than that. People _complain about it being on_. Look at any forums about home network or WiFi troubleshooting and switching it off on your router will often be in the ‘first, do this’ sort of answers.
Even here this often comes up. The sentiment is ‘IPv4 has to work reliably because so many people don’t have IPv6 and things need to work for them. You’re only asking for trouble by also having IPv6’. As a practical matter it’s hard to argue with, but it’s not a way to make progress…
Carrier-grade NAT (multiple consumers sharing the same IPv4 address) mostly averted catastrophic problems though. It's not perfect, but it works.
A better use of your time and attention will be identifying what, within your scope of influence, can be done to further the reach of global v6 routing.
I agree it’s more important that IPv6 rolls out faster and is more widely adopted today.
But as to your original claim “ Any effort that may be applied to reclaiming v4 address space will always be better directed to expanding global v6 connectivity.” is a false dichotomy.
Just add another octlet at the start, but stored in the options field. Old stuff won't get confused, and new stuff will know that empty means 1.x.x.x.x.
Problem solved.
This is basically the same problem as IPv6, except worse since we'll start from zero.
In hindsight, clearly a better plan than "this is IPv6, it's new, it's better, everyone will adopt it!" was needed for IPv6, and it would have helped if the IPv6 people were a bit more pragmatic from the start in their design (religious opposition to NAT springs to mind), but now it's about 20 to 25 years too late.
All we have to do, is explain that ipv6 reduces anonymity online, and thus, makes it easier for predators to track children. And thus, ipv6 endangers children!
This will enable a wellspring of governement grants, to roll out firmware updates for switches and routers, etc.
See? A non-problem.
Maybe this isn't a serious enough crisis and we can just wait til it becomes a real issue for users. When it does, it will probably be incremental rather than catastrophic, so we'll still have time to upgrade networks piecemeal, and with more reason to do so.
This assumes that they can even get an IPv4 address. New ISPs and telcos may not be able to get enough IPv4 addresses to assign each individual connection one.
So either (a) the CPE only gets an IPv6 address and they have to use DNS64/NAT64 or 464XLAT to reach the IPv4 Internet, or (b) the CPE gets a shared address space (100.64.0.0/10) IPv4 address and CG-NAT ensues:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_shared_address_space
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
In which case the end-user gets to deal with double-NATing (first with their CPE/home router, and second by the ISP).
Case in point someone that is surprised that every customer gets a public IP address and CG-NAT is not done:
I haven't recently looked at who has deployed what, but is this really it? US ISPs like Spectrum has been handing out IPv6 addresses for years now. My Verizon wireless phone can access IPv6 resources w/o issue as well.
However, show me the cloud services folks are implementing that are dual stack. Start mandating new service deployment is dual stack, and it'll happen. Similar to how the US Govt is pulling it off.
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2021-Janu...
V6 has conquered big chunks of networking (mobile telephony) but deploying a v6 on the wider, public internet remains pointless.
As far as existential threats go: everybody thinks locally and acts globally in most, if not all of their actions.
And existential threats and mortality are difficult for people to deal with. In fact there’s a whole branch of human activity devoted to that topic (religion).
I don’t mean to reduce the significance of the risk (I dropped my other work and now work in climate repair myself) but I think there is are fascinating and instructive lessons to be learned from this example.
I just hope the Big AJAX Industry doesn't bribe congress to subsidize Fossil Protocols such as XML and SOAP, just to delay the transition to more environmentally friendly technologies like JSON and ReST.
NOTE: This packet is sold by net wait, not by volume. Packed as full as practicable by modern automatic equipment, it was delayed the full net wait indicated. If it does not appear full when opened, it is because contents have been compressed during shipping and handling.
By "everybody thinks locally and acts globally" are you making fun of all that old hippie shit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally
Announcement: The new official slogan is "act globally, act locally". Please update your programs.
This classic 1973 paper by W Wulf and Mary Shaw of CMU was the manifesto of the early anti-globalization movement:
The parts of the internet stuck on v4 (hard wired IPSs) won't move until is economical unviable to not use v6. Hopefully the rapid increase in v4 IPs price will eventually push them to sell off their addresses and move to v6.
In comparison, the parts of the economy dependent on oil/coal won't move until its more expensive to continue.
I have a hard time believing that big corporations can be pressured with this kind of policies, seeing that they can just pass on the extra costs down the line to the customers.
No, I say it's the middle class: they can only just afford those big social signals they drive every day and don't want to give them up.
Cut subsidies and give more money to the poor.
Switching to heat pumps means that our electric grids need to become a lot more reliable, both in terms of weather resistance and generation capacity.
All of the "currently need electricity" furnaces can be replaced with heat pumps without improving reliability of the grid. And if that is X% of the furnaces, we get X% of the total benefit by doing so. With IPv6, as long as each person accesses a single server node that is IPv4 only, then each person needs an IPv4 address.
> In designing the IMPs, BBN made it possible to loop the host and modem interfaces of the machine, so they could conduct “loopback” tests. The loopback test, which could be performed remotely, connected an IMP’s output to its input, effectively isolating the IMP from the rest of the network. This generated test traffic through the interface and allowed BBN to check the returning traffic against the outgoing traffic generated by the IMP.
So it seems like it was in there from the very beginning. No mention of the 127/8 address specifically though.
That's the same as any system right now. If I bind to 127.0.0.1 I don't automatically get traffic for or listen on 127.0.0.2
... you haven't worked on Linux or Windows networking stacks. On Linux, typing http://[::ffff:7f00:1]/ when you have a bound server on 127.0.0.1 will automatically connect to 127.0.0.1. Conversely, it's a illegal operation in Windows: you cannot legally bind even with SYSTEM privileges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Scientology
http://smokyhole.org/kh/kh.htm
http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=6289
Readers of alt.religion.scientology were astonished to notice a large collection of alleged secret, copyrighted and trade secret protected documents of the church of scientology posted anonymously over the weekend of May 5. An expert source known to Biased Journalism verified the documents as authentic.
[snip--to transcript from a deposition of Keith Henson by the "Church" of Scientology. Lieberman is their lawyer.]
Lieberman: do you know who Patrick J. Volk is?
Henson: to the best of my knowledge I've never heard of this person.
Lieberman explains that Volk is apparently communicating from some educational institution in Pittsburgh. Henson still doesn't recognize the name. Lieberman hands Henson a document.
From: hkhenson@shell.portal.com (H Keith Henson)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: OT Materials...
Date: 6 Apr 1995 19:35:38 GMT
Parick J Volk (pjvst+@pitt.edu) wrote:
: Screw the courts....
: I have an ftp site for all the OT materials...
: ftp:127.0.0.1 /pub/texts/news/alt/religion/scientology
: I don't know how long I'll have it up.
: P J Volk
: (alt.2600 lives! All hail the clams and trolls!)
Great stuff! But don't you expect the 'ho to blow a gasket?
Lieberman: (acidly) you find this amusing?
Henson: yes. It's an in joke.
Lieberman quotes from the Volk post: "screw the courts" and also says that he has an ftp site for all the OT materials. "Mr. Henson is laughing hysterically about this posting for reasons that I suppose he understands--" Henson offers to explain.
Lieberman: What's an ftp site?
Henson explains that ftp means file transfer protocol. You can use almost any machine on the Internet to access a file on almost any other machine, that has been placed in an ftp directory, he says with relish. [He goes on at length about how this is done.]
Lieberman: Okay. "So when he said 'I have an ftp site for all the OT materials,' he is saying he has all the OT materials on a site which people can access." Was Henson aware of Patrick Volk's ftp site? Does this refresh your recollection? he demands.
Henson: well, you see right after the colon, it says ftp:127.0.0.1?
Lieberman: yes.
Henson: that's a loopback address.
Lieberman wants to pursue the question of the site with the OT materials. Was Henson aware of Patrick Volk's ftp site?
Henson: (patiently) It's at 127.0.0.1. This is a loop back address. This is a troll.
Lieberman: what's a troll?
Henson: it comes from the fishing where you troll a bait along in the water and a fish will jump and bite the thing, and the idea of it is that the internet is a very humorous place and it's especially good to troll people who don't have any sense of humor at all, and this is a troll because an ftp site of 127.0.0.1 doesn't go anywhere. It loops right back around into your own machine.
Lieberman [not getting it]: So the idea here was to make the church think that this person had an ftp site and to take action against him and, in fact, he didn't have it; is that your point?
Henson: Oh, it's really humorous, and I picked up on it and instantly added something to extend the troll. Extending the trolls like this is an art form of the highest order.
Lieberman (acidly): I see. So this is part of your art form where you say, "don't you expect the 'ho to blow a gasket?"
Henson: yes.
Lieberman (starting to lose his temper): so you do remember this posting apparently?
Henson (helpfully): I can't remember for certain that I did this one, and certainly I could not swear to any of the material on here being letter perfect on it (but he goes on to say that it is such a good one that he would be happy to take credit for it).
Lieberman: You find this whole thing kind of amusing, don't you?
Henson: Oh, this is screamingly funny.
Lieberman (no more Mr. Nice Guy): You find it amusing to make Helena Kobrin and the church go after you or other people for this sort of thing, whether you have the materials or not; is that right?
Henson: It's a great game.
Lieberman: It is a great game. You really find it amusing, don't you?
Henson: It's an extremely amusing thing.
Lieberman: All right. You find it amusing when you receive these letters from Ms. Kobrin, the cease and desist letters? It's part of the game; isn't it? [This goes on for awhile as Lieberman hammers at the point. Henson reiterates that he is amused, and wants to talk about the SP levels.]
Lieberman: You find it an amusing part of the game when you receive these cease and desist letters, right?
Henson: No, no. It's not amusing, it's a major increment in status.
Lieberman: I see. You feel this increases your status, right? On the internet, on a.r.s.
Henson: Yes, absolutely.
Lieberman: All right. And it's all part of this game, right?
Henson: Absolutely.
Lieberman: It's all part of the troll, right?
Henson (waving exhibit): This is a great troll. I mean, anybody in the computer business instantly would have spotted this, ftp:127. In fact, it even says trolls in here (indicating). In fact, this was cross-posted from --
Lieberman has heard more than enough about trolls: "There is no question pending. You can hold your comments."
Lieberman (with an air of getting into the bizarre nature of the situation): why did you think this would cause Ms. Kobrin to blow a gasket?
Henson: this wasn't addressed to Helena. He goes on to explain that the message is a loop back. If it worked at all it would be a loopback to your own machine. If you tried it you'd discover it's a troll. The 127 is the loopback address! It's a joke, but the lawyer isn't getting it.
[The observer notices that the RTC lawyer has connected "the 'ho" with Ms. Kobrin. Evidently the nickname has made transit to the solid world. Ms. Kobrin is stuck with it for life.]