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What is the origin of the private network address 192.168..? (lists.ding.net)
submitted 6 days ago by rssbot@lemmy.bestiver.se to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 6 days ago

For the non link clickers. I give it interesting enough:

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)