169.x addresses for /30s?

[gamccall]

Reading the docs for AWS Direct Connect, I noticed they assign 169 addresses for the point to point links between customer router and Amazon edge. Does this work in normal environments? What would the drawbacks be? I'd love to have this as an option to reclaim all the 1918 space I'm using for point to points now.

[Collin Clark · Accepted solution]

Yes this would work. No draw backs until a Windows engineers sees it in a traceroute. Read RFC5735. HTH

[Tagir Temirgaliyev]

windows   uses  169.254.x.x 

[Joseph Nelson]

AWS apparently uses the 169.254.x.x/16 space as well.

I can't think of a drawback to using this space. You can use any IP space you want in a private network, so long as your end-systems don't need to access services on those commandeered IP spaces. 

I'm curious, are you really hurting for those p2p IP addresses?

[gamccall]

It's not so much the number of addresses used (although they do add up in a WAN with hundreds of locations); the real problem is that there's no safe address space in RFC1918 to use for PTPs which won't potentially collide with the private address scheme of the next company we buy.

Problem will be solved with IPv6 and MPBGP, as soon as the carriers get around to upgrading...