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."

Comments

Who cares

[Formalin]

Just apply the real cure already... This is so ridiculous.

Re:Who cares

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I know IPv6 is needed, and it'll be great having disposable addresses to throw at any device. I'll be certainly happy to get rid of NAT in many circumstances, but OTOH, IPv6 is going to suck. I have tens of IPs in my head, which I access daily by memory. IPv4 addresses are easy to remember, easy to pass over the phone, easy to type, and easy to operate (i.e, calculate things such as masks in your head, etc). IPv6 is going to make it way harder, and that's not taking into account he migration process ...

Re:Who cares

[mellon]

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!

Re:Who cares

[DigiShaman]

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!

Re:Who cares

[slimjim8094]

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.

Re:Who cares

[bbn]

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.

Sell the Addresses? Don't Give Them Ideas

[grcumb]

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.

Re:Sell the Addresses? Don't Give Them Ideas

[jibjibjib]

Giving away a block of IPv4 addresses worth about $1 billion is the same as literally giving away $1 billion of taxpayers' money. I don't think that would be doing "the right thing" for the people of the UK.

Re:Sell the Addresses? Don't Give Them Ideas

[jibjibjib]

The amount it cost in 1994 is irrelevant in the decision about what to do with it now.

If it can be sold for $1 billion, then giving it away for nothing is equivalent to giving away $1 billion.

Let's reserve our favorite numbers now!

[RulerOf]

Am I the only one that sees something like this and immediately wants to call dibs on a "Vanity IP?"
I'll take:

• 51.51.51.51
• 51.52.53.54
• 51.0.0.1
• ...and 51.50.49.48

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.

relatively common

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:16.777 != 16.9

[Psicopatico]

Someone used the Imperial IP which is slightly bigger than the Metric IP, hence the result is 16.9.

Re:Really?

[camperdave]

They're holding on to them until the rest of the world coughs up the missing Dr Who episodes.

I believe...

[AliasMarlowe]

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!

Re:I believe...

[AliasMarlowe]

I also believe a WHOOSH! is in order for you, sir/madam.

Some of that 51.0.0.0/8 actually is in use

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not publicly routed doesn't mean unused

[Martin S.]

Just because this block is not public does not mean it is unused.

The UK Government has a huge darknet.