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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."
Just apply the real cure already... This is so ridiculous.
An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region.
Why not just ask them to do the right thing and give them back to RIPE? I mean seriously, what kind of example are we trying to set here? Or maybe someone's just trying to bootstrap a market for IPv4 addresses in order to cash in on the increasing scarcity....
... In any case, encouraging profit from a public resource like this is a terrible idea.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
This sort of thing is relatively common, it's probably used internally as a routable address space, but not intended for use on the public Internet. (Saves have to deal with multiple uses of rfc1918). This sort of thing is very common in the government (though usually much less than an /8). They can't use a consistent rfc1918 address space internally as whenever the government changes it's priorities, work units will shuffle between departments. You'll probably find that this address space is now used by many departments, and trying to move all users over to another range will cost more than they can recover from selling the /8
I enjoy the idea of the Internet actually functioning as an end-to-end network the way it was meant to, rather than one with a handful of privileged devices with publically routable addresses and (soon enough) whole cut-off sub-Internets trapped behind them. But that's just me.
"The way it was meant to" was specified by a bunch DARPA funded geeks who design their tech for a small network where all the admins knew each other. They had no concept of operating a network with large numbers of users, many of them malicious
Whenever I hear "the way it was meant to" I run the other direction. It's always based on some lame notion that things were perfect in the past, even though people in the past were also whining about "the it was meant to."
Someone used the Imperial IP which is slightly bigger than the Metric IP, hence the result is 16.9.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Ah, the widescreen version.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
They're holding on to them until the rest of the world coughs up the missing Dr Who episodes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I believe in the incremental approach to updates; it's so much safer and usually easier.
So it's going to be IPv5 for me, while you suckers make a mess of IPv6!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
What's wrong with manually assigning IPv6 addresses? That works just the same as it did with IPv4:
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:6a0:114::9
netmask 64
gateway 2001:6a0:114::1
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.9
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
You just get a much bigger range to choose from, which you may use or not.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Plenty of people have noticed this before now, IANA has published a table showing all the /8 allocations pretty much since they were formed. Anything flagged as "LEGACY" was assigned before the current RIR/LIR assignment process was implemented. Someone even complied a table showing which parts of the legacy IP assignments were not routed some years back, which must have included the DWP's /8 as well unless they were actually advertising it at the time that the table was compiled.
/8 and IPv4 allocations within Europe and those parts of Asia that fall under RIPE's remit are now heavily restricted. You can probably expect a similar story about the dozens (see the table above) of underused /8s that are held by US corporations and government agencies, the DoD especially, when ARIN's IPv4 approaches exhaustion as well.
The only thing that makes this slightly newsworthy is this about a cash strapped sovereign government sitting on a sizable pool of "spare" IPv4 space that has suddenly become a much more valuable commodity following the recent announcement that RIPE is now down to its final
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"The Slashdot user known as bbn has a /48 block of IPv6 addresses that is unused. An e-petition was created ..."
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Use radvd instead of DHCP6. That way IP addresses are predictable and unique, as long as you use /64 subnets which is standard practice with IPv6.
You can take a machine's MAC address and predict its IPv6 suffix perfectly. Add it to your /64's prefix and you know your IP. radvd and your clients will figure the same IP out on their own.