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UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses
hypnosec writes "The Department of Work and Pensions in the UK has a /8 block of IPv4 addresses that is unused. An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region. John Graham-Cumming, the person who first discovered the unused block, discovered that these 16.9 million IP addresses were unused after checking in the ASN database."
Dude, it's time to learn how to set up DNS. Honest, it's not that hard. Your DHCP server can automatically update the DNS for you. Try it—you'll like it!
I won't even get into how IPv6 makes it much easier to track you.
Because that's nonsense? (Almost) Everybody implements the privacy extensions, so your world-visible address is random and changes every 10-ish minutes.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Local government network admin here. Parts of the 51.0.0.0/8 address space is in our internal routing table, because it's used for shared private networks between different government organisations. Just because it's not in the public Internet routing table doesn't mean it's not used.
Granted perhaps not the whole /8 is in use (I only see 3 x /16s out of a possible 256 in my routing table at present), but who's to say other sectors which I don't have network connectivity to aren't using it.
We're actually pushing for and slowly enabling IPv6 internally on our core and servers where we can, rather than delay the inevitable. This is despite our organisation ourselves owning a whole public /16 block, yet have maybe only 10-15k addressable nodes max across all our networks we control at present. It will take us much much longer to re-IP/re-subnet the entire network more efficiently so some of that space can be returned to RIPE, than for it to be reallocated and used up after returning, due to old systems and old proprietary software in use. Not to mention the resources required to do such a massive task.
Personally I think the people asking for addresses to be returned by any organisation (supposedly) not using them (including all the other apparently wasted /8 allocations out there) are not looking long term enough. IPv6 is the way to go.
Just because this block is not public does not mean it is unused.
The UK Government has a huge darknet.
IPv6-addresses can actually be much easier to remember than IPv4. Why? Because there is a system to it.
Here in the RIPE region there is only three possible prefixes for any address: 2001::, 2003:: and 2a0x::
In practice you are only working with one or a few ISPs. This means the first two blocks are always going to be the same. My ISP has 2001:1448::.
We got a /48. We happens to be number 201. So our addresses are all starting with 2001:1448:201::.
Everything from that point on is something I decided. If I want easy to remember addresses I would choose easy to remember addresses. My primary server could be 2001:1448:201::1. I would remember it as the ::1 server.
It is true that if you let your hosts autoconfigure to a random interface identifier that will be impossible to remember. But there is nothing stopping you from using manually configuration or DHCPv6 to number your hosts in a human friendly manner.