Comment by shadowgovt
1 year ago
This is remarkably business-as-usual for airplane electronics.
As a more mundane example: the wifi on planes does temporary [edit: DHCP, not NAT] leases. But the system on many has expiration windows on the order of hours, possibly more than a day... Couple that with the number of passengers planes serve and busy routes can easily exhaust the lease pool.
The solution: there's a button the flight attendants can push to reboot the router, dumping the lease table.
Nitpicking here, but you mean DHCP rather than NAT, right?
Yes; thank you.
Even with super long leases, couldn’t they just have a larger subnet? A /8 oughta do it.
But I guess we’re talking about the same people who made the mistake in the first place…
To steelman the choice, the reserved IP /8 subnet is 10.x.x.x and is often used for corporate networks and other larger subnets experience similar usage. People on the plane using WiFi are likely to access their corporate networks via VPN, potentially causing routing issues.
Users VPNing into the reused address space for their own home VPN are probably knowledgeable enough to figure out what is going on and a small enough user base to not care about.
I'm no network guy so someone please explain why using 10.x.x.x. on a plane might "potentially cause routing issues"? It doesn't jive with what I understand about unrouteable address spaces. Is the 10.x.x.x space somehow different than the 192.168.x.x space that millions of people use VPN's out of every day (basically every WFH person on their cheap NAT'd home Wifi)?
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Couldn't we spare a single extra /8 for airplanes to use?
Though I suppose it's not worth it when you can hit 'reboot'.
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