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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?"
lets just switch to IPv6, it's more functional and future proof
This is curiously similar to the current credit crunch. When a fix is not guaranteed to happen soon, people start hoarding.
Perhaps some of the institutions that still have class A networks reserved from the old days, with no reasonable need for them, should give them back.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
you can give one of these poor unwanted IP's a home.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Maybe these addresses are simply leftovers from before people started to make wide use of NAT, which cut down a whole lot on the # of addresses in circulation
Would giving them back do anything other than encourage network providers to procrastinate on IPv6 for another couple years?
If the big fortune 100 companies would dump their IP blocks that they don't use more then 10% of the whole sensationalist scare of "OH MY GOD WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF ADDRESSES" wouldn't even be relevant.
/8 subnet... unless they have everything open to the internet, which is moronic.
Also, to quote someone from the last three articles related to IPv4 running out, it seems like one of these articles shows up on the main page at least once per month and nothing has changed.
I don't see why any company, even in the expandable future, would use every address in a
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
People setting up networks aren't trying to use every single address in their space.
It's far easier to use an entire a.b.c.* as a logical sub-domain than fiddling with netmasks and all that stuff so that a.b.c.1 and a.b.c.200 are on different subnets.
The amount of work people would need to invest to use every single IP address with no holes would be cumbersome. (I'm not saying you can't do it, it's just tedious.) And, you never know when you're going to need to allocate more machines -- I remember getting blocks of IP addresses for static machines in case I needed another machine in the future.
Now, why most people aren't using 10.*.*.* as their internal stuff I'll never know. Since the overwhelming majority of machines on the internet aren't (and shouldn't) be directly routable, it's an awful waste to not have organizations behind NAT-ed firewalls and not drawing from the common pool of route-able IP addresses.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
In the oil-business (and in many other fixed-resource industries, more then likely) there is a particular kind of legislation that would likely work very well in such a situation. It is known as 'fallow field legislation'.
It works like this:
If a company finds (or buys) rights to an oil field, they are given five years to start producing from it. If they do not, cannot, or are otherwise unwilling after those 5 years, the rights are revoked and the government (or governing body) will find someone who will and can.
Fast forward to IPv4 -- any address that isn't being used (and by used I mean that there is no web presence, to use of e-mail, etc.) after a certain time period (perhaps 1-2 year(s)) then the address is revoked and put back into the public pool.
Obviously, the easiest way to get around this little regulation would be to put up a place holder page, or redirect it to the main site. This would be much trickier. Likewise, it would not stop the name squatters (and increasingly the registrars) from putting up those SPAM pages, but like I said, it would fix the problem of people just sitting on a resource without using it.
My $0.02
I drop ICMP entirely, and besides our website and mailservers, we don't have any standard tcp ports open on any of our other external IPs. I really can't imagine it's that much different for other medium and large businesses; am I to believe they nmapped the entire Internet? (It's clear FTA that they did not) To me, these findings are not that surprising in the security-oriented world we live in today.
What happens to the IP addresses allocated to companies that are now (a) bankrupt, or (b) bought out by larger companies, or (c) allocated to companies now significantly smaller in size? There must be a significant pool of addresses that could be reclaimed there.
e.g. dec.com, compaq.com, sco.com, sgi.com....
In addition to all those lying idle because of excessive address space allocation, there are huge swaths of space which have been hijacked. Recent discussion on the NANOG list has highlighted some of these; the Spamhaus DROP list features others. And other researchers have found still more that are obviously no longer under the control of their putative owners, and are being use for spam, spyware, phishing, and worse. Attempts to get network operators, registrars, ICANN, ARIN, and others to effectively disable these resources -- and eventually to reclaim them -- have been largely unsuccessful. Yes, in some isolated cases, limited action eventualy takes place, but it's far too little far too late to be considered anything close to "effective". We need a concerted, worldwide effort to not only reclaim this space, but to blacklist for life those found currently possessing that -- because (as we've seen repeatedly) they won't be deterred by anything else.
Last I checked, MIT had all of 18.*.*.*...
http://www.grammarmudge.cityslide.com/articles/article/992333/8992.htm
http://www.askoxford.com/betterwriting/classicerrors/grammartips/lyingandlaying
If you are in the process of putting something down, you are laying it down, but that object once it is there, it is lying. The verb lay has a direct object that the action is performed on. He is laying the book credenza. She is laying her purse on the counter. Once it has been laid, it is now lying. The book is lying on the credenza. The purse is lying on the counter. IP addresses are lying unused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I just setup redundant internet connectivity, and needed to get a class C address space, even though I only use a dozen or so addresses. I guess this is to limit the size of routing tables. Seems like a waste.
There is an interactive map on their site that allows you to zoom into the IP space pretty nicely. Our uni has a B range of addresses and we use only two Cs of that right now. When we split off from the main building and got onto city fiber, they decided that, rather than give us a private IP range like the other campuses, we would be allocated one of the C ranges.
Of course, no one knew what they were doing so getting the ASA and default routes set-up properly was a nightmare, but hey, we're using more of our IP space now! (sarcasm intended)
"This food is problematic."
From the article:
The USC research group used the most innocuous type of network packet to probe the farthest reaches of the Internet. Known as the Internet Control Message Protocol, or ICMP, this packet is typically used to send error messages between servers and other network hardware.
My home network is in complete stealth mode, and to them that's another "idle IP" address.
I also love how they arrived to their conclusion:
the team probed a million random Internet addresses using both ICMP and TCP, finding a total of 54,297 active hosts ... ...
In total, the researchers estimate that there are 112 million responsive addresses
but the overall conclusion--that the Internet has room to grow--is spot on
How did this ghetto-science experiment end up on Slashdot again?
If you can't mod them join them.
the IT hysteria of the early century. just as juicy a media hit as the Y2K panic and fear from last century, but not as much consulting opportunities
personally i'm waiting for 2012, when the elder gods of the mayan calendar awaken and in their rage at not being greeted by chocolate, peppers, and virgins, they reroute all null pointers in all code to the apocalypse. plenty of IT hysteria, plenty of consulting opportunities
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
See http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/
019/8 Ford Motor Company 1995-05 LEGACY
marvin@tribble:~$ host www.ford.com
www.ford.com is an alias for
www.ford.com.edgesuite.net.
www.ford.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1200.g.akamai.net.
a1200.g.akamai.net has address 96.17.109.74
a1200.g.akamai.net has address 96.17.109.18
013/8 Xerox Corporation 1991-09 LEGACY
marvin@tribble:~$ host www.xerox.com
www.xerox.com is an alias for www.xerox.com.edgekey.net.
www.xerox.com.edgekey.net is an alias for
e82.c.akamaiedge.net.
e82.c.akamaiedge.net has address 72.246.128.108
009/8 IBM 1992-08 LEGACY
marvin@tribble:~$ host www.ibm.com
www.ibm.com is an alias for www.ibm.com.cs186.net.
www.ibm.com.cs186.net has address 129.42.58.216
003/8 General Electric Company 1994-05 LEGACY
marvin@tribble:~$ host www.ge.com
www.ge.com has address 192.131.227.156
048/8 Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05 LEGACY
marvin@tribble:~$ host www.prudential.com
www.prudential.com is an alias for web.prudential.com.
web.prudential.com has address 12.34.100.148
Apple (17) and HP (15) have their public website within their allocation. Eli Lil(l)y (40) appears also has their public website within their allocation, but I have a hard time believing that they could ever need that many public IP addresses.
So there... I just found an extra quarter million addresses. (5 x 2^16) Y'all can pay me by giving me my own /24.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
The most comprehensive scan of the entire internet for several decades
As opposed to the great Internet scans of the 30s?
and you can have them when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers. I would never be able to get them today, but way back in the early nineties they just gave them away. I had ten sites and wanted to start a Frame Relay network, so 'they' gave me a Class C for every site and one to knit them together. A couple of my sites had less than a dozen computers. Of course, these days even the copy machines have an IP address, so those sites are up around two dozen or so. One of them is doubling in space, so we'll be up to fifty or so. One of our sites closed, so that freed up an entire Class C, but our largest site is pushing the limits, so we moved the empty Class C to the large site. The numbers are scattered all over the place. .1 is always the router. Of course, the hubs have their own IP address. Public access stations started at .100 to be easily recognizable, but then the staff machines got up to .99 so we had to hop scotch over the public numbers and keep going with .200. The numbers are static because it's easy to track, and when we first started it seemed a reasonable path to take.
Could we do this differently. OF COURSE!! There are lots of ways to free up a ton of space. Please don't lecture me on how to do it. I know how to do it. It's just that the system is working now. The system just kinda grew on us. When we started we had no idea copy machines would have IP addresses. Even the damn VoIP phones have IP addresses! That was a big hit on our numbers. Are refrigerators next? We had no idea we'd have fifty servers instead of three or four. Life has changed and because we are realtively 'wealthy' in terns of addresses, we had the flexibility to change with it.
I look at our Class C's kinda like a fixed field database. There's a lot of air in there. It compresses really nicely if you need to, but disk space is cheap, so there's no real reason to conserve it.
The thing is, even though we have a bunch of empty addresses, our experience shows that we're going to grow into them. We've already encountered congestion a couple of places. As soon as those new fridges show up we'll need some more numbers. My guess is before too long we're going to have to do some subnetting and consolidate a couple of our small sites into one Class C to free up the other one to use in a large site. That should work fine. I don't see any problems pulling that off. Of course, if we build another big site, we'll have to think through what to do very carefully. e'll probably do the new site like y'all want us to. We may not have any choice.
But those Class C's are mine. I own them, and you can't have them back.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
But my refrigerator, it needs, nay, craves an IP address, so it automatically orders my eggs and ravioli and orange creme soda, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals.....
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
This story rings true. I worked for a company during the dot-com boom and just after which requested an allocation from RIPE (the European equivalent of ARIN). I was the designated & trained "LIR" (I think that was the term?).
We received 8,192 IP addresses. We actually had them authorized to us in blocks of 256 addresses, and each time we needed another 256 we had to go back to RIPE and justify the expansion. However it is my understanding that the full 8,192 addresses were reserved for us.
We ended up using 3 x 256 addresses, but after a later downturn in the fortunes of the company, even many of those went unused.
I left the company many many years ago. However I notice the company that acquired it is still using those 3 x 256 addresses, and the original 8,192 are still reserved at RIPE. The IP addresses are even registered to the name of a director who was ousted when the company was taken over, at a street address that the company hasn't occupied for many years.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
lets just switch to IPv6, it's more functional and future proof
Yup and it is probably much simpler. Trying to reclaim addresses involves political issues, finding out who to talk to, bureaucracy and some technical issues. Switching to IPv6 is about technical stuff and just getting going. You are going to have to switch to IPv6 at some point, so why spend energy twice?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Granted, it may be cheaper, in the short term, to use NAT than to upgrade to ipv6.
But imagine if no one was using NAT anywhere. This would have two effects:
First, techniques like Skype's UDP hole-punching would be completely unnecessary. You wouldn't even need a central server -- you could just use protocols like SIP the way they were meant to be used.
Port forwarding would be a thing of the past. Far more peer-to-peer technologies would just work.
Second, we'd run out of IPv4 a lot faster.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's best, however, when you are laying someone else -- as in "I'm laying your girlfriend." "I got laid by your wife."
Once it has been laid, it is now lying.
So in other words, there are no Slashdot users that are lying. If they say they are lying, then they are lying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This whole discussion is a waste of time. You aren't going to get any of these address blocks without an expensive and prolonged fight. Wasting valuable resources that could be used to advance a real solution, IPV6.
Even if you "liberated" all of these address blocks, they would be quickly consumed by the natural growth of the Internet.
NAT is not a solution, it is a malignant blight that must be destroyed. If you want a firewall, get a real firewall.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
TCP and ICMP is not a good way to test this. Plenty of IPs won't respond to a ping and don't have any TCP ports open for inbound connections (SYN flag set).
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
It appears that all they did was ping every address they could, and then track which addresses responded and which ones did not. Consdiering how many systems are either configured to not respond to ping, or sit behind firewalls that stop the ping from getting through, this seems like a method of marginal value.
Wouldn't there be a better way to query the addresses than this? In some areas, I suspect checking DNS records might be more informative if what you are looking for is which addresses are unused (though of course DNS isn't mandatory either).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes I am sure the researchers have no idea what a firewall is. And everyone is a network admin with their home routers...
Of course these researches used logic to determine when a firewall is in place. One possible way would be to look at a subnet as a whole, if neighboring IPs are responding you can make a reasonable guess that other IPs should respond if binded to another node. This is a sampling of 4 billion, so no, individual circumstances where this doesn't hold up won't make a difference.
Wait for the actual paper to come out during the conference. If your research with your home router shows this is an incorrect paper, you can call them out. After all this is what peer review is all about.
My address is behind a firewall that doesn't respond to unsolicited incoming packets. It's in use, but you'd never know it from the outside.