The 69/8 Networking Problem

jaredmauch writes "A number of networking providers who receive address space from ARIN have been having problems with their recent IP space allocations. This is a result of outdated filters that applied a few years ago during the boom time of the net, but have not been updated to reflect the current state of the network. Here is a paper that documents some of the problems this filtering is causing providers."

Comments

heh

[ergonal]

Wine me, dine me, 69/8 me!

Re:heh

[_ph1ux_]

no no no - we're talking about networks here buddy. So its:

Ping me, finger me, 69/8 me!

Unreserved some time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or was this block removed from the reserved list by IANA and assigned to ARIN roughly midway through 2002? Man, the lag is getting worse around here all the time..........

Re:This is a marketing issue

[JoeBuck]

And the answer is:

Shame on us.

I've got a better solution...

[Dimensio]

Find the Internet's most notorious spam-supporting ISPs, like Qwest and Verio and anything in China or Brazil. Revoke all of their allocated IP space and give it to ISPs requesting new IP allocations, then redistribute the 69/8 IP addresses to Verio, Qwest, etc. That way no one will need to update their filters.

Re: I've got a better solution...

[shani]

Right, because nobody filters IP addresses from ISP's that originate spam.

Re:Not surprising

[jmt9581]

Curse slashdot for making me wonder "I Am Not A What?" as I skimmed over this comment . . .

While IANAL (linguist, not lawyer :) the namespace for acronyms is really becoming overcrowded. :)

Re:neat math thing

[lostchicken]

Why is Christmas like Halloween?

25 DEC = 31 OCT

Re:How much?!!

[bigberk]

Silly ph1ux, you can't use CIDR and class together. The purpose of CIDR is to provide more network granularity than the octet-centric 'class' based approach - see this little guide on subnetting and CIDR Blocks.

Re:Not surprising

[lucifuge31337]

Further testing reveals that Windows still uses classful logic to determine whether an IP is 'valid' or not. On attempting to ping 202.59.108.255 from a slew of windows 2000 boxes, tcpdump showed nothing on the other end. An identical test from a unix box showed that it worked just fine.

This is /. Rephrase your observation in the form for a blatant MS-bash and tell everyone that's why they should be running Linux.
There will be no more warnings for this type of blantant oversight. I trust it will not happen again.

Boy I must be tired...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"The 69/8 Networking Problem"

When I first read that, I thought 69/8 was a reference to my boss's sense of time. "To beat the competition, you must work 69 hours a day, 8 days a week!"

Man I hate crunch time.

Allocation

[karlm]

Back in 1997, my MIT fraternity house had a /16 network in a house zoned to house 22 people. That's about 3,000 IP addresses per person or 16 IP addresses per square foot (a very crowded house, we moved to a much bigger house later). This is probably a world record for IPv4 address density. (The MIT low-cost residence might have beat us.) It appears that MIT has gone to routing only two /24s to the house now and left the other 254 /24s unallocated.

Some countries only get a sinle /24 network. The IPv4 space is full of huge differences in per capita allocations. There are tons of cases where huge corporations and universities have hundreds or thousands of times more unused addresses than used addresses. IPv4 routing tables would get unmanageable if you tried finer grained allocation, but there is little objective reason why MIT needs 16 million public IP addresses. When you have several hundred IP addresses per person, it's no wonder the MIT Media Lab comes up with ideas like IP-enabled tennis shoes.

Re:Not surprising

[hardcode]

IANAIANA

I am not an internet assigned numbers authority

hc