8 ms·
What is the origin of the private network address 192.168.*.*? (2009)
- youknow123 1y agoThey needed private IP ranges that wouldn't conflict with the real internet. 192.168 was just sitting there unused, so they grabbed it along with 10.x.x.x and 172.16-31.x.x.
- Symbiote 1y agoRead the article rather than making something up.
- 3np 1y agoAnd what did you learn from what article, actually?
- rzzzt 1y agoNarrator: noone came up with an answer. Someone purported the origin to be Sun but it turned out they used a different address in examples.
- bmacho 1y agoWhich article? The posted emails? Superuser audience disagree https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-specifically-choose-192-168-16-to-be-a-private-ip-address-class https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-spec...
- Sharlin 1y agoThat’s such an awesome answer by Michael Hampton. I had never heard of Jon Postel before now.
- marcusb 1y agoIt isn't an article, but a mailing list post, and the post starts out with: This is a fuzzy recollection of something I believe I read, which might well be inaccurate, and for which I can find no corroboration. I mention it solely because it might spark memories from someone who actually knows: Spoiler: it sparks one memory from one person, who winds up being mistaken. Offering an alternative hypothesis seems reasonable given the content of the post.
- amelius 1y ago[flagged]
- 3np 1y agoYou already have .internal reserved, you know?
- alkz 1y agono
- Etheryte 1y agoThe problem with this idea would be all the existing software, hardware and infrastructure out there. You would either need to make it an alias, which wouldn't really change anything, or you would need to update everything everyone everywhere has, which is essentially the IPv6 migration and we all know how that is going.
- marcusb 1y agoHow would you express that in an IPv4 header? These address ranges serve a real purpose. edit: OP: just like the downvote button is not for disagreement, the delete button is not for karma management. Not sure why you would respond to my post here and then immediately delete it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 1y agoIsn’t there a max of -4 per comment anyway? I’ll admit I get upset when people downvote me for my opinion, but I don’t think deleting the comment is ever really worthwhile.
- marcusb 1y agoI think so. It also disruptive to anyone who comes here and sees replies to a deleted comment and can't see the context.
- 3np 1y agoThe entire thread: >>> This is a fuzzy recollection of something I believe I read, which might well be inaccurate, and for which I can find no corroboration. I mention it solely because it might spark memories from someone who actually knows: >>> A company used 192.168.x.x example addresses in some early documentation. A number of people followed the manual literally when setting up their internal networks. As a result, it was already being used on a rather large number of private networks anyway, so it was selected when the RFC 1597 was adopted. >> sun > Wasn't 192.9.200.x Sun's example network? of course you are correct. sorry. jet lag and not enough coffee. --- So no answers.
- nickdothutton 1y agoI worked in the early 90s getting UK companies connected. The number of people who had copied Suns (and HPs and others) addresses out of the docs was enormous. One of them was a very well known token ring network card vendor.
- tmn007 1y agoThis is a bit of history in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1466 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1466
- kragen 1y agoIs it? What section do you mean? I don't see anything in there about private networks or 192.168.0.0/16 (in CIDR notation, which didn't exist at the time).
- weinzierl 1y agoSince the posting does not give a real answer. 192 is 11000000 in binary. So it is simply the block with the first two bits set in the netmask. 168 is a bit more difficult. It is 10101000, a nice pattern but I don't know why this specific pattern.
- marcusb 1y agoI don't think this does anything to explain why 192.168/16 was chosen specifically. Three netblocks (10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16) were selected from the class A, B, and C address spaces to accommodate private networks of various sizes. Class C addresses by definition have the two most significant bits set in their first octet and the third set to 0 (i.e., 192 - 223.) 192 in the first octet starts the class C space, but 10 and 172 do not have the same relationship in classes A and B.
- weinzierl 1y agoYes you are right. I researched a bit and there are other reserved blocks next the 168 that obviously don't have a nice pattern. So the 101010 is just a coincidence.
- drewolbrich 1y ago101010 in decimal is 42.
- temp0826 1y agoThat is the answer..!
- Hikikomori 1y ago192 is the first C class, 168 likely next available when rfc1918 was written.
- weinzierl 1y ago
- pumplekin 1y agoYou should read https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1627 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1627 for a path not travelled. Not everyone thought this was a good idea, and I still maintain the alternative path would have led to a better internet than the one we today.
- high_priest 1y agoCan you please elaborate? How would such a minute change lead to "a better internet"?
- emacsen 1y agoI'm not the OP or author, but the argument against private network addresses is that such addresses break the Internet in some fundamental ways. Before I elaborate on the argument, I want to say that I have mixed feelings on the topic myself. Let's start with a simple assertion: Every computer on the Internet has an Internet address. If it has an Internet Address, it should be able to send packets to any computer on the Internet, and any other computer on the Internet should be able to send packets to it. Private networks break this assumption. Now we have machines which can send packets out, but can't receive packets, not without either making firewall rule exceptions or else doing other firewall tricks to try to make it work. Even then, about 10-25% of the time, it doesn't work. But it goes beyond firewall rules... with IP addresses being tied to a device, every ISP would be giving every customer a block of addresses, both commercial and residential customers. We'd also have seen fast adoption of IPv6 when IPv4 ran out. Instead we seem to be stuck in perpetual limbo. On team anti-private networking addresses: - Worse service from ISPs - IPv4 still in use past when it should have been replaced - Complex work around overcoming firewalls I'm sure we all know the benefits of private networks, so I don't need to reiterate it.
- zokier 1y ago> every ISP would be giving every customer a block of addresses, both commercial and residential customers. or more likely, you would still receive only handful of addresses and would have needed to be far more considerate what you connect to your network, thus restricting the use of IP significantly. Stuff like IPX and AppleNet etc would have probably then been more popular. The situation might have been more like what we had with POTS phones; residential houses generally had only one phone number for the whole house and you just had to share the line between all the family members etc.
- der_gopher 1y agoFor real? I thought it somehow relates to bits and bytes...
- emmelaich 1y ago(2009)
- dang 1y agoAdded above. Thanks!
- Sharlin 1y agoUser bmacho cites this Superuser question [1] in a reply to a downvoted comment at the bottom of this thread. It’s much more illuminating than the OP emails; Michael Hampton’s answer in particular is amazing. I had never heard of Jon Postel before. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-specifically-choose-192-168-16-to-be-a-private-ip-address-class https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-spec...
- morning-coffee 1y ago> I had never heard of Jon Postel before. Reading this makes me a bit sad and reminds me that I'm older now and lucky to have grown up during the golden age of the Internet.
- Sharlin 1y agoMm. I’m an older millennial, so solidly in the Web 1.0 generation, but never had the chance to use the internet before the web took off. I missed BBSs too, which were big where I’m from (probably bigger than the pre-Web internet, outside universities at least). I was fourteen when Postel died in 1998. My earliest memories of internet use are probably from ’96 or so, using library or school computers after classes.
- alvarete 1y agoWeirdly enough I grew up having inside my network during the 90s, 127.26.0.X instead of the widely spread 192.168. It created a big trauma when I joined the uni and hit the wall. I suppose this how americans feel about the metric system :p
- temp0826 1y agoDoes that even work? I thought all 127/8 was loopback
- dragonwriter 1y agoThat whole /8 is reserved for loopback, but sometimes (usually?) only 127.0.0.1 is implemented as a loopback if you know that that’s true of your equipment, you could use the rest of that space for local addresses instead of 192.168/16, 172.16/12 and/or 10/8.
- nbngeorcjhe 1y agoLinux has a few sysctls that allow you to treat 127/8 as normal addresses. probably a Bad Idea to enable them though
- temp0826 1y agoOn my (fedora) system I can ping 127.anything and the host responds. I think in practice it is indeed implemented. I haven't used windows/macos in a very long time but I think the same applies. (Also in fedora by default systemd-resolved binds to 127.0.0.53)
- alvarete 1y agomy bad, it was 172.26.0.X
- zettabomb 1y agoWeirdly enough, there are a few systems at my workplace which are in the 192.9.200.x subnet! They're only about 20 years old, though. We are actively looking to replace the entire system.
- Aeolun 1y agoFrom another post on here: > > Wasn't 192.9.200.x Sun's example network? > of course you are correct. sorry. jet lag and not enough coffee.
- EvanAnderson 1y agoI've done work for several municipalities and police departments in western Ohio and found 192.9.200.0/24 in several. They all had a common vendor who did work back in the 90s and was the source.
- gausswho 1y agoWhile I've got some eyeballs on the subject, I'm tiring of mistyping this across my local network devices. How many of you folks alias this, and in what way? /etc/hosts works for my *nix machines, but not my phones, I think? I'm also tired of remembering ports, if there's a way of mapping those. Should I run a local proxy?
- jerkstate 1y agomDNS works well for names on your local network, you can integrate it with your dhcp server, works on hosts and phones. I don't have a good answer for ports.
- mdaniel 1y agomDNS is like the LLM of DNS: sometimes, for some audiences, it works well, but when it doesn't work you're SoL trying to fix it other than "have you tried $(sudo killall -INT mDNSResponderHelper)?" I'm not aware of any DHCP change needed for that, since to the very best of my knowledge mDNS is a broadcast protocol. Involving DHCP would be pointing it at the copy of dnsmasq running on your router, such that the hostname that the devices present to DHCP are then resolved by dnsmasq, no mDNS required
- akerl_ 1y agoI just stick all my DNS records in a normal DNS server. In my case I’m terraforming some Route53 zones. So I havd a subdomain off a real domain I own that I use for LAN gear and they all have real DNS. For ports, anything that can just be run on 443 on its own VM, I do that. For things that either can’t be made to run on 443, or can’t do their own TLS, etc, I have a VM running nginx that handles certificates and reverse proxying.
- Thorrez 1y ago10.0.0.1 or 10.1.1.1 would be a bit easier to type. You could migrate there.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
- isThereClarity 1y agoDaniel Karrenberg, co-author of RFC1918, said this 2017-10-06 on the NANOG mailing list: > On 05/10/2017 07:40, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > Does anyone have a pointer to an *authoritative* source on why > > > > 10/8 > > 172.16/12 and > > 192.168/16 > > > > were the ranges chosen to enshrine in the RFC? ... > > The RFC explains the reason why we chose three ranges from "Class A,B & > C" respectively: CIDR had been specified but had not been widely > implemented. There was a significant amount of equipment out there that > still was "classful". > > As far as I recall the choice of the particular ranges were as follows: > > 10/8: the ARPANET had just been turned off. One of us suggested it and > Jon considered this a good re-use of this "historical" address block. We > also suspected that "net 10" might have been hard coded in some places, > so re-using it for private address space rather than in inter-AS routing > might have the slight advantage of keeping such silliness local. > > 172.16/12: the lowest unallocated /12 in class B space. > > 192.168/16: the lowest unallocated /16 in class C block 192/8. > > In summary: IANA allocated this space just as it would have for any > other purpose. As the IANA, Jon was very consistent unless there was a > really good reason to be creative. > > Daniel (co-author of RFC1918) https://web.archive.org/web/20190308152212/https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2017-October/092636.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190308152212/https://mailman.n...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- michaelcampbell 1y agoThis is probably apocryphal, and I'm probably getting the details wrong anyway, but tangentially related to this, when I worked for a small network security firm (later purchased by Cisco, as most were), we had a customer that used, I'm told, the IP ranges typically seen in North Korea as their internal network. They TOLD us they did it because the addresses wouldn't conflict with anything they cared about, and no one had told them about 1918 + NAT, which I find dubious. This was in the 10's of 1000's of devices.
- bluedino 1y agoWorking a large company who was allocated a massive block of IPs in the early days, being one off of a reserved subnet has resulted in so many typos.
- Hilift 1y agoMost SMB companies did not have IP addresses in 1994 when RFC 1597 was published, although the range was known. However, the well known companies did, and some of those have the older full class B assignments. It was common for those companies to use those public IP addresses internally to this day, although RFC-1918 addresses were also in use. Since Netware was very popular in businesses and it was possible/common to use only the IPX protocol for endpoints, you could configure endpoints to use a host that had both an IPX and IP address as the proxy, and not use an IP address on most endpoints. That was common due to Netware actually charged for DHCP and DNS add-ons. When Windows became more popular, IP on endpoints likely used RFC-1918 around ~1996.
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago> It was common for those companies to use those public IP addresses internally to this day Yep, a desktop PC with its own IPv4 address. Back in the day, no firewall afaik.
- simne 1y agoWell, I'll try summarize answers and my experience. At beginning, Internet used network classes, because of hardware limitations (later switched to address blocks). And even in 1990s still existed very old hardware, only could use class addresses. What classes mean, existed early very large organizations, got more addresses than they could use. And even happen few cases, when such organizations lost rights for these addresses. And these unlucky organizations was some big whales, like IBM or ATT/Bell or Sun. And once invented solution - state some big enough network as not allocated to use under NAT (or when network is not connected to Internet). So, departments of big organizations could use TCP/IP stack in their networks, even with old hardware, but don't need to contact Internet officials to got real internet addresses. 192.168 was just first C-class network prefix, was not assigned at the moment (or just released). Later, to list of unassigned added 172.16/12 network.
- merlyn 1y agoNote, the CIDR RFC didn't come out until Sep 1993. Thus even brand new network equipment in the mid 1990's were still very classful. And even then, knowledge of how to properly use /etc/netmasks in SunOS v4.x (or the equivalent if some other network stack even had one) was very scarce. In the mid 90's, SMBs connecting to the Internet would have very typically obtained a /24 from their ISP, and had direct connection online, no firewalls, barely any proxy servers (although that was popular for some mid sized customers that would have needed multiple /24s or even a /16 to get all their workstations online). It wasn't until the company Network Translation, with the PIX came about that anybody even considered doing private IP address in general as a firewall strategy with NAT translation using private IPs. And then it took years and years to become popular. Long bought by Cisco at that point. I don't think Cisco IOS even had NAT until something like 10.2, when it was a premium license package.
- icedchai 1y agoI got a provider independent /24 block back in the 90's, when I was barely out of high school. I'm still using it to this day! I remember those early days. No firewalls. No proxies. I had that /24 on my home network, totally unfiltered. Kinda nuts thinking about it today.
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? What's the history behind 192.168.1.1? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17467203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17467203 - July 2018 (48 comments)
- dreamcompiler 1y agoApparently this is an example of paving the cowpath. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
- aa-jv 1y agoIt was 1994. We're a 2-man crew, about to start one of America's biggest ISP's. We'd just gotten the closet cleared, the racks assembled, the modems installed, the terminal server wired up, the USENET machine booted, and we're waiting for the T1 to go live. The modems are answering calls, but there's nowhere for our new subscribers to go .. yet. The tech line rings, its the T1 guy on the other end "Ready to configure your router with you if you're ready .. " Sure, I say .. whats our IP address .. "198.162 .. " "WAIT!", I say. "Are you SURE about that?" He sure was. The line comes up, the routes flow, customers get online for their first time. But for months afterwards I was constantly in fear of our IP address. Junior network guys would call me up in the middle of the night, adding some NOC somewhere or other "it doesn't work!" - "did you mix a 2 and an 8?", I'd say .. and much swearing would be heard until things started working again. Man, that was fun. Getting that IP address assigned to us definitely was an act of mischief on the part of some devil somewhere, I'm quite sure ..
- icedchai 1y agoHooking up that first T1 was super exciting! I worked at an early ISP (not a big one) in 1995. They were still on a 56K dedicated line and a very small bank of modems. I still remember when the guy from MCI showed up to test the new T1 we were getting. The first frame relay customers I brought up were also super fun. I sometimes miss networking.
- aa-jv 1y agoThey were fun days but I wouldn't go back to it for anything. I realize now, we were building a monster. LoRA is all the world needs. ;)
- urbandw311er 1y agoOh wow. Genuine question - if you could go back, would you go through the hassle of getting a different one assigned?
- aa-jv 1y agoNo - it was a nuisance, but it was also kind of cute to see other network engineers brains reboot when they saw the IP .. ;)