
Chapter 3 • Patching IPv4 39
in this way can never offer more than a marginal improvement in
the address shortage situation. One potential problem with recycling
addresses derives from the practice of hard-coding IP addresses into
applications, rather than relying on DNS. If clients always use DNS to
reach host hostname.example.com, they’ll always reach that host; if they
use an IP address that someday is recycled, the application will fail.
This problem should be insignificant unless developers try to bypass
DNS to improve performance at the cost of standards compliance.
Replacement Usually, a piece of infrastructure is replaced entirely only
after