A Story about Private Network Range

export no_proxy=.local,.internal,.arpa,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16

When I try to search the best pratice on setting no_proxy, I found an interesting story about how the 192.168/16 subnet comes from LOL.

@misterkbar:

Unusure about 172..., and 10.... seems rather obvious.

192.168... is pretty funny though. It was originally Sun's network range. When they built Sun Workstations, they were all shipped with this address range in various config files. Since Sun started shipping product LONG before the Internet™ existed (the Arpanet™ did, but not the public Internet™), you could just use all these configuration files without modifying anything and BAM! Instant private network ( although back then, ALL networks were private :-) )... sort of like how the default printer for BSD Unix distributions was the machine in the basement of the UC Berkeley CS building!

When Al Gore created the Information Superhighway, all of a sudden all these 192.168... setups started conflicting. The answer was then obvious: place a NATing gateway on an installation and let 192.168... be the private network.

References:

• We need to talk: Can we standardize NO_PROXY?
• Address Allocation for Private Internets
• Why this private IP only range 172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255?