@graf >you want to fix your IPv4 exhaustion start there.
If you want to fix your IPv4 exhaustion, upgrade to IPv6 like you should have done 20 years ago.

Even if 14 /8's were released for reallocation, those will run out too in just a few years.

Meanwhile, it's a bit hard to exhaust 2^128 (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456) IP's even with 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) addresses per network segment.

>why do we need 16.7 MILLION loopback IPs?
Since it was quite difficult to semi-cleanly allow for more than one loopback IP without allocating it as a /8.

It would be futile to try to reallocate 127.0.0.0/8, as huge amounts of software will break and most routers will drop all packets from that address range - it would be far easier to just enable IPv6 on all computers.

IPv6 meanwhile only has 1 loopback address (::1), as the designers knew that loopback is only for temporary testing and you should use unix sockets instead of IP if you want multiple local daemons to talk to each other.


Every single recommendation I've read as to how to solve IPv4 address exhaustion either will only have a temporary effect or would be far more difficult than just enabling IPv6.