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UK's 'Unallocated' IPv4 Block Actually In Use, Not For Sale
jimboh2k writes "The UK may have 16.9 million 'unused' IPv4 addresses but according to the department that owns them, they're not for sale. The Department of Work and Pensions says it would be too expensive to reallocate those addresses and, even if it did, it would not stave off IPv4 address exhaustion by much."
The addresses in question are being used for a new internal government network. Of course, why that project wasn't built using IPv6...
Changing the contract will cost them at least 20% more than the current overrun.
What's so difficult about switching to IPv6 ? I mean where the cost really is ? It is not like I have to buy all of my hardware again, it is mostly a software issue right ?
To me that means they should all be 10.x.x.x, and some IT workers are completely and totally incompetent.
Well some old dinosaur US companies or even universities own a full Class A.... do you think they need the address space more than a government ?
IBM CSC Dupont MIT Ford Apple USPS... etc.
see the list at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
Sell the block for a billion or whatever it's worth, and use the money to build an IPv6 backbone for UK government services. That in turn would free up more blocks which they could continue to sell and continue to fund the transition with. Or they could sit on them and do nothing until the world switches to IPv6 and there is a glut of IPv4 addresses that nobody is interested in buying.
If you want a free v6 tunnel there are less elitist providers than sixxs. gogo6 (aka freenet6) even offer unauthenticated tunnels for individual machines* so you can just install their software and go.
Still I consider such tunnels as a tool for those who are interested in developing/testing IPv6 and maybe as a stopgap measure for a subset of end users who really need to reach v6 servers. If you are serious about v6 then you should be using a v6 capable ISP.
*If you want a prefix you have to create an account and authenticate to it but afaict creating an account with them is no big deal.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Unless all systems attached are on the same subnet... And that plays hell with routing, causes congestion... There are reasons the 10.x is non-routed. It was aimed at large local networks - like a node cluster. Sucks when you have to go past a router. That requires routable numbers.
BS you can route subnets of 10.x on your private networks just fine. You just can't advertise them on the public internet.
The real problem comes when you are trying to link together a load of sites that are already using some part (or even all, it's a class A block so the default netmask is 255.0.0.0) of 10.0.0.0/8 for their local private network. It is likely that some users will need access to both the national network and existing local private networks. So if you use private IPs for your network you are stuck either trying to find a subset of 10.x that none of the sites are using (can work but there is no gaurantee there will be any such space and it's a problem if you want to add more sites later). Renumbering machines unrelated to your network at various sites so they don't clash with your network or using some horrible NAT hacks.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
sixxs dont require a linkedin account (or something changed since i created mine and several friends accounts)
all you need is to say you want to test ipv6 on your home computer (or home network) and put your real info (name, email, etc)... that isnt much different from registering on any website.
Requiring real info is normal, as you will access the internet with their connections, its normal they want real info to contact you or to redirect any police request if you want to use their network for illegal activities
Higuita
For those that remember the days before NAT was prevalent, this is what way IP addresses were supposed to be used.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I think what people have forgotten here is quite how old the internet is, for how long the British have been involved in it, and how tightly integrated into British government it has been for a long, long time.
I'm sure Slashdotters don't need a history lesson on the origins on the internet; as a cold war military network designed to re-route traffic in the event of a nuclear strike on what would otherwise be single points of failure. What readers might need a reminder on, is the UK aspect of this early history.
Whilst the internet began as a US-only operation, within only a handful of years this had spread to the US' closest NATO ally, the British. Given that even us Brits cheerfully admit that, from a NATO perspective, our island is essentially a 700-mile long aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic that can never be sunk, the involvement of the UK in the early days of the internet should come as no surprise. It's also well known that both American and British universities got in on the act fairly quickly, initially from the perspective of military research; most British universities were either directly addressable or a short hop through a gateway from the internet by the early 1980s. Other close NATO allies, notably the Canadians, ditto.
What's not so well understood is that, as absolutely certain first exchange targets, the British had an extremely highly developed government continuity strategy for nuclear war. Some parts of this have come to minor public attention in the form of amusingly retro nuclear bunkers that have been re-purposed as museums, archives or modern telecoms junction points (look up the codenames Guardian, Anchor and Kingsway) with varying degrees of practicality. There are some very chilling bits like the "Protect and Survive" videos (now on Youtube) that frankly still scare me silly and we'd all rather forget. Further, there other parts such as the RSG Regional Seats of Government which remains partially, or perhaps even largely, obscured by national secrecy (and probably rightly so).
This stuff was set-and-forget, it's original design brief was that you wouldn't be able to call the IT department if the IT department had been killed in the first strike, it had to work and remain working without significant intervention.
Understand that concept - understand that the internet has been at the heart of the most serious British government infrastructure for around 40 years - and you begin to understand why /8 IPV4 address blocks have been, often literally, hard-wired in to the British government. This network was the network we would rely on, to survive. It was the one thing the British government could depend upon. It was the one thing which, when planning IT infrastructure, the government could be absolutely certain about.
Having that level of certainty allowed us to build other infrastructure around it, such as the PSN Public Services Network,
To those arguing that it's just a bunch of router reconfigurations... this is not your piddling little /24 home office network. Nor is it simply a bunch of VPNs linking regional offices over a few leased lines. This is not even one IT-savvy megacorporation like IBM. This is a nuclear-war-proof combined civilian and military network which over 40 years has been integrated into every government department and every local government office in a country of 70 million people. It's in the job centres, the benefits offices, the local tax offices, the post offices, the village doctors' offices. It's throughout public service departments which are staffed by people who, on the whole, are pretty good civil servants but who don't actually have a reason to need to know how it all hangs together, and in the vast majority weren't around when it was plumbed in.
Would this cost more than the value of the address space to reconfigure to 10.x.x.x or IPV6? Crikey, yes, Ten times yes. Magnitudes of scale yes.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
This is slashdot, everybody already knows to use Hurricate Electric.