Millions of Internet Addresses Are Lying Idle

An anonymous reader writes "The most comprehensive scan of the entire internet for several decades shows that millions of allocated addresses simply aren't being used. Professor John Heidemann from the University of Southern California (USC) used ICMP and TCP to scan the internet. Even though the last IPv4 addresses will be handed out in a couple of years, his survey reveals that many of the addresses allocated to big companies and institutions are lying idle. Heidemann says: 'People are very concerned that the IPv4 address space is very close to being exhausted. Our data suggests that maybe there are better things we should be doing in managing the IPv4 address space.' So, is it time to reclaim those unused addresses before the IPv6 crunch?"

Comments

Many addr's may be behind firewalls...

[Anonymous Coward]

We get this all the time from our ISP's. "Our scans reveal that you're not using much of the space we've allocated to you." In reality, those IP's are behind firewalls that only permit certain customers to reach them. Otherwise they don't respond - even to pings. The IP's appear dead to everyone except authorized users, and our ISP's aren't authorized.

Re:Give back class As

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I work for one of them, GE - the entire "3.x" class-A network, 16million addresses - most of our internal network is those 3.x addresses, behind firewalls so basically useless - and even better, I pinged a few external GE sites I know of, and none of them even use 3.x addresses!!

maybe 500K employee's & contractors, even add 500K more for servers and unallocated IP's in the ranges, that's still 15*million* unused. Besides which, we could easily run on 10.x internal networking and NAT/Proxy to outside.

Don't be in a hurry to get them back though... its not a priority! (haha)

Re:TCP and ICMP

[Anonymous Coward]

I drop ICMP entirely

Then you're an idiot who has no business managing a firewall.

Re:screw ipv4

[BitZtream]

You're missing the fact that an IPv6 /64 is what a home user gets, not the total address space. The IPv6 address space is 128 bits, meaning you get 2^64 blocks of 2^64 addresses.

Meaning every square millimeter of the earths surface can be assigned approximately 667 quadrillion unique addresses. With your math, I personally can assign every 0.29cm^2 of the Earth an address out of my block alone.
Please see:
http://en.linuxreviews.org/Why_you_want_IPv6