MIT No Longer Owns 18.0.0.0/8 (ttias.be) 130
An anonymous reader shares: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8. That's a very big block of scarce IPv4 addresses that have become available again. One block inside this /8, more specifically 18.145.0.0/16, was transferred to Amazon.
RTFA (Score:5, Funny)
I did it! I read the whole article. And so did everybody who read the summary.
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Re:RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
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Possession of an IP address does not create a "fiduciary responsibility."
You seen to have fell off a meme wagon.
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Possession of an IP address does not create a "fiduciary responsibility."
You seen to have fell off a meme wagon.
You SEEM to have FALLEN off a meme wagon .. FTFY :P
you seem to have fallen off the grammar wagon
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Surely you mean "a" grammar wagon, as excepting situations of internal conflict grammar is merely a matter of style in English.
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Surely you mean "a" grammar wagon, as excepting situations of internal conflict grammar is merely a matter of style in English.
Nope, it's one big , singular fucking wagon and you ain't on it!
there's right way and a wrong way and you got it very fucking wrong.
So tell me Captain Bollocks... in which manner were you using literary device of "internal confl
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If you couldn't parse it, you didn't get to play. Not my problem.
If I was French, I might want to get onto some singular grammar wagon, but since I use English I won't go anywhere near that shit. Like my friend said after getting an English degree: The first three years they teach you rules. The last year they teach that those are fake rules to help you practice, and actually it all a matter of style.
People who claim there is only one style, or that it is in poor style to use a construct that they cannot co
Re: RTFA (Score:2)
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OK smartypants, if you think it is an "error," what is the authority on English grammar? Is there a book or something that lists the rules?
You're hilariously fucking stupid. You can't even comprehend the nature of language, or the meaning of the word "grammar," or the meaning of "error." And yet you argue and dig and dig, even telling me that I'm digging, and yet, I do know the nature of language, I do know the source of authority for grammar, and if there is only one or a choice between several. (spoiler:
Re: RTFA (Score:2)
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maybe these will do the trick.. they are good enough for universities. [theguardian.com]
or these should suffice [amazon.com]
you SEEM to think that "seen" is a perfectly fine and esoteric substitute for "seem"... it's not.
You also seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that you are right under all circumstances even when blatantly wrong.
I als
Re:RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Because IPv4 addresses are valuable ($10 range currently) Having 16.7 Million of them is a nice chunk of change, letting 65K of them go for free seems to be a breach of fiduciary responsibility by someone.
They are not resellable like that, what they have is not property just a reserved allocation, and one that can be revoked if they start treating it as resellable property.
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Yeah, that's what ARIN says, but I've seen several companies sell off their IPv4 space to other companies, and ARIN doesn't revoke the transfer.
Re:RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
The legal status of legacy allocations has never been especially clear. They were allocated before the RIRs even existed and long before anyone thought IP addreses would have any value.
In any case after arguing about it for years most of the major RIRs (ARIN, RIPE and APNIC) have allowed sale of IP addresses subject to some conditions. They have concluded that making IPv4 addresses a marketable commodity is the least-bad way to manage the post-exhaustion era.
I guess that MIT probablly cut a deal with ARIN allowing them to carve up the block into smaller sub-blocks (allowing them to sell the unused sub-blocks while keeping the used ones) in exchange for agreeing to ARIN taking a role in the address space's management.
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Because they don't have a national wide network.
Re: RTFA (Score:1)
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*vomitting sound*
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Endowments come with many strings attached. Just because they have $13B USD doesn't mean they are allowed to spend it anyway they like. Most of the funds are earmarked for specific purposes. Additionally it must be invested to ensure future returns.
It's not like they could just cut a check for $13B...
Re:RTFMA (Score:5, Informative)
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Here's the changelog from the ARIN list if anyone's interested:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-issued/2017-April/003050.html
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IPv6 has already gained critical mass. The CDNs are all turning on IPv6. The wireless ISPs are delivering the Internet over IPv6 today translating connections to IPv4 to talk to legacy servers. Sensible fixed line ISPs are delivering IPv6 today as it cuts down the CGN costs. The biggest players on the Internet are using IPv6 only internally translating connections to IPv4 to talk to legacy servers. IPv6 is not going away. It will just grow and grow.
When a home becomes IPv6 enabled (basically replace t
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Hoarding the addresses wasn't against any rules because when those addresses were allocated the rules didn't exist and the rules were not applied retroactively to existing allocations only to new allocations made under the new rules.
Selling the addresses might have been against rules in the past (the legal status of early allocations was never very clear) but nowadays the three biggest RIRs are open to the idea of selling IP addresses subject to some conditions. Presumably MIT came to a deal with ARIN to al
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Dammit! I was saving the article for later!
Shouldn't you have put a "spoilers" warning in your subject line?
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Re: But Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody envisioned more than a few thousand computers on the Internet. The notion that hundreds of millions would be limiting was ridiculous.
Re: But Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/ [xkcd.com]
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, just the MIT LCS lab, not even the whole school, had the A block.
DEC also had a class A address block for a while. HP got this, plus their own, when they bought DEC. At one point, HP had twice as many IP addresses than China.
The Internet grew way more than any of the founders thought. 4 billion addresses seemed huge back then. Look at the List of assigned A blocks [wikipedia.org] and how A blocks were thrown around in the early days.
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LOL at HP.
15.0.0.0/7
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15.0.0.0/7
CIDR does not work like that!
Or ... thatsthejoke.jpg?
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My stupid joke.
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15.0.0.0 is not /7-aligned. 14.0.0.0/7 and 16.0.0.0/7 are valid, but 15.0.0.0/7 is not.
Even if 15.0.0.0/7 were valid CIDR notation, it would include 14.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255, not 15.0.0.0 - 16.255.255.255 as was intended.
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Informative)
14.0.0.0/8 and 15.0.0.0/8 could be combined to 14.0.0.0/7 (or 15.0.0.0/7 if you prefer). 15 and 16 can't be combined. Do it in binary and it will be more obvious.
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Because IPv4 was designed as a limited proof of concept, with IPv6 being the properly designed replacement.
IPv4 was supposed to be deader than a can of SPAM by Y2K, and as historical as stacks of punch cards at this point.
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I still use punch cards. It's just so much easier to reorder lines of code that way. Also, the NSA has a harder time snooping on my card decks and I've never gotten a virus from a card sneaked into the deck by an intruder. It is, however, getting harder and harder to get my 029 serviced and running in top notch condition.
Re: But Why? (Score:1)
I used to hang out at the batch terminal at college. Because one of the top cards in the punched deck fed into the card reader was the password card. So it was one of the most likely cards to get mangled and end up in the wastebasket.
I got a lot of free computer time that way.
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Because there was already a protocol whose assigned protocol number is 5?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The main hubs were the ones with always-on dedicated links to other major hubs. They were the ones which got the class A subnets. It made sense because then they could then parcel out the IP addresses to the minor hubs and spokes as they saw fit, and thus DNS resolution could always be handled locally (and thus immediately). For those of you who weren't on the Internet back then, because data was mostly being transmitted as store-and-forward, email typically was only slightly faster than postal mail (usually took a few hours to days to reach someone on another continent), and DNS changes could take up to a week to propagate through the entire Internet. So being able to resolve DNS changes locally quickly was a big deal.
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The internet wasn't even public. If they had known Al Gore and the other "Atari Democrats" in Congress were going to come along and spend money opening it to the world, they would have started with something like IPv6. We got IPv4 because it was only for institutional communication and research. MIT is big on both of those, they do lots of work for government, for industry, and in collaboration with other institutions, in addition to their world-renowned research programs.
In that environment, anybody import
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Back in the good old days when the Internet was used mainly for colleges and government agencies. These colleges will reserve large blocks for themselves. I went to a small college and they had a Class B and two Class C IP address ranges (Back in the time Class B was X.X.0.0 and Class C was X.X.X.0) giving the colleges more than enough IP address for the who institution. Hack in the late 1990's every PC was connected to an unprotected Static IP address for their PCs.
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Because in the early days the Internet had an 8 bit network field and a 24 bit host field. So every network got what was later called a "class A" and even later called a "/8".
Some of those allocations were reclaimed when networks shut down, but MIT kept a network running continuously, so they were able to keep their allocation.
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The thing is the IANA (and by extension the RIRs) only have power because the cabel of backbone operations (at least one of which owns a couple of /8 blocks) say they do. Attempting to forciblly reclaim addresses like you propose could well cause major backbone operators to tell IANA to go fuck themselves. Having different providers disagree on who is the rightful owner of addresses is not good for anyone.
Yes a market based approach means a few early adopters got a moderately large chunk of money for doing
Trade. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Trade. (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree.
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I'm somewhere in the middle on this.
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Isn't this supposed to be Funny rather than Insightful? Because I have a bunch of 10.0.0.0/8 addresses to trade. And 192.168.0.0/16, and 172.16.0.0/12 too. Take your pick.
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No we're not! i'm browsing slashdot from work *right now!*
Class A shaming (Score:1)
Internet Society: "Folks in the developing world can't get IP addresses for their servers and gateway routers and you guys are just sitting on yours. Now c'mon!"
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Internet Society: "Folks in the developing world can't get food and water and you guys are just sitting on yours. Now c'mon!"
FTFY.
Xerox Too (Score:2)
https://whois.arin.net/rest/or... [arin.net]
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I have a small section of 10.0.0.0/8.
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Don't we all, my friend, don't we all...
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Interesting, I wonder if there has been a policy change allowing /8 holders to split their blocks and sell the unused parts.
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Or, let's just all migrate to IPv6 and be done with this.
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IPv6 is fundamentally not very different from IPv4. Yes there were a load of half-baked ideas from the IPv6 proponents but you don't have to use them. If you want you can use DHCPv6 in stateful mode and even use NAT66 to run IPv6 in almost exactly the same way you run IPv4. Yes there are issues with features such as port security on switches but that is because port security is in itself a hack and therefore needs to be updated for IPv6.
Running dual-stack however is a massive PITA. Basically it means you ha
Too many IP addresses (Score:2)
For those interested, Wikipedia has an amusing list of original A level IP assignments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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A nationwide ISP here in Argentina, back in 2004, was assigning a whole /24 when you got their "gold" service. It was 1mbit, guaranteed, all business crap, and came with a /24. /24 to a more sensible /29... and my server was in .200/24. .2 to get access back...
One day one of our servers stopped responding to the internet. Without any warning, they cut off the
I had to give instructions to a field tech there to change the IP to
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Well, I'm going to be a pit pedantic, and remind you that a /24 necessarily a class C. After the arrival of CIDR, and the end of classfull networking, we've moved to a better solution.
That said, there is a very valid reason why a small organization might have an entire /24 even if they only have a few people. If you want to be truly multi-homed, with multiple connections to the Internet, announced via BGP, the smallest allocation you can advertise is a /24. It's better than in the old days, when most of the
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Re: Too many IP addresses (Score:1)
Not the only interesting assigment (Score:4, Interesting)
Ford still seems to own 19...
Halliburton, Eli Lilly, U Michigan, Prudential, Merck are some of the more notable assignees.
Some of these must be subnetted and farmed out, but IPv4 is destined for obscurity, so why bother?
Still, reading RFCs and seeing Jon Postel's name makes me want to tear up. Miss him.
I feel old (Score:2)
For the last 25 years or so I've been using "traceroute -n 18.0.0.1" as a quick and dirty way to see what the route "outside" looks like (because that assignment was one of the most "permanent" features of the Internet). It's a right move, to be sure - there is absolutely no reason MIT should control that many addresses. Just a small piece of nostalgia. Still can traceroute though ;)
From MIT's official statement (Score:5, Informative)
https://gist.github.com/simons... [github.com]
"Fourteen million of these IPv4 addresses have not been used, and we have concluded that at least eight million are excess and can be sold without impacting our current or future needs, up to the point when IPv6 becomes universal and address scarcity is no longer an issue. The Institute holds a block of 20 times 10^30 (20 nonillion) IPv6 addresses.
"As part of our upgrade to IPv6, we will be consolidating our in-use IPv4 address space to facilitate the sale of MIT’s excess IPv4 capacity. Net proceeds from the sale will cover our network upgrade costs, and the remainder will provide a source of endowed funding for the Institute to use in furthering its academic and research mission.
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lots of addresses tied up by big companies (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot of expensive real-estate tied up in these "8-blocks"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
HP, by virtue of their acquisition of the assets of DEC, has 2 8-blocks, which is probably worth a small fortune in real money. 33 million IP4 addresses.
Most (all?) of these were reserved in the great IP address land grab back in the early 90s.
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Most (all?) of these were reserved in the great IP address land grab back in the early 90s.
Kids... Sheesh... Try late 70's...
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc790
Now get off my lawn...
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HP, by virtue of their acquisition of the assets of DEC, has 2 8-blocks, which is probably worth a small fortune in real money.
It's a big fortune, the average price per address has exceeded $10 for awhile now. /24s routinely sell for $4-5K these days, /19s for around $100K. HP's space is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
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IPs are only worth that much because they're extremely scarce right now. If HP tried to unload all their address space at once they probably wouldn't get all that much for it.
It's kind of like big executives who are worth a billion or more because of their stock holdings, but if they tried to sell it all the price would tank because of basic supply and demand.
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That is incorrect. The price of IPv4 addresses is capped by alternative ways of solving the problems that IPv4 addresses solve, not by lack of demand. You would have no trouble at all unloading an entire /8. The market would soak it up and ask for more. If you want to make IPv4 addresses worthless, you need to make them useless. Hoarding them is a good way to do that, because that spurs the transition to IPv6. Once there are significant chunks of the internet that IPv4 users cannot interact with, the price
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To put that in perspective HPs market cap is about 30 Billion dollars.
Apple should be next. (Score:2)
Apple needs to shed a few, as well. They own 17.0.0.0/8
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I wonder how many IBM has to spare. They own all of 9.0.0.0/8
Pick on the worst offender for IP hoarding (Score:1)
Good. Very few organizations actually need a /8.
The US military has several. No point. Free them up!
Reminding me that DoD (USA) have 13 of those!! (Score:2)
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Re: Reminding me that DoD (USA) have 13 of those!! (Score:1)
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I've heard that the UK MoD 25/8 addresses aren't even connected to the routeable internet.
I don't know if they are or not but LogMeIn Hamachi use the 25/8 space for their VPN address space.
'Bout time (Score:1)
We never really did run out of IPv4 addresses (Score:1)
We just have a bunch of hoarders.
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
I have, like, TONS of 192.168.x.x addresses and I only use a few. How can I sell the rest?
You can have my ... (Score:2)
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I had to loopback around, and re-read this comment.
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Mod up (+1, Facial)
FTFY.