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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."
I'll take:
I'm sure there's an algorithm or list that could tell me all of the possible "desirable" IPs in the /8, but, due to the fact that we shouldn't be greedy, and the completely arbitrary relation to the number 4 for IPv4, and the fact that it's an election year here in the US, I propose that we Slashdotters limit ourselves to four a piece, and leave the remainder to Reddit and 4chan. Or something.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Sometimes DNS fails or you need to validate routing tables and troubleshoot based on pure IP alone. Yes, IPv6 is going to suck badly in this regard. Feeble human mind. Oh well, I'll just have to get used to depending on an IPv6 calculator app on my smartphone. That and a TXT list that I can cut-n-paste in a terminal screen. Bah!
Life is not for the lazy.
mysql> select count(host) from systems;
| count(host) |
498 |
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
(stupid slashdot thinks mysql's output are junk characters)
Since most of those 498 servers I manage are behind NAT and have dynamic public IPs, I do have a system to track them (not ddns, but a homemade solution), and I have scripts in place that allow me to get any server's IP. Combine that with shell expansion and I can ssh root@`gethost customer_id server_id` and similar stuff. That doesn't mean you don't have to deal with IP addresses anyway, and it doesn't mean doing ifconfig eth0 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 is gonna be easy. Imagine debugging a routing table! Imagine reading the output of tcpdump with such meaningless addresses. IPv6 is gonna be a PITA.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It won't be that bad at first, until a lot of addresses are used, because of the IPv6 notation shorteners. For example, ff06:0:0:0:0:0:0:c3 may be written as ff06::c3. Unless your ISP gives you a random number as an IP address, it'll still be fine to work with.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Like RFC 1751 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1751) for instance :)
Although it does tend to come up with sequences that have some comedy smutty parts.