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MIT No Longer Owns 18.0.0.0/8 (ttias.be)
An anonymous reader shares: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8. That's a very big block of scarce IPv4 addresses that have become available again. One block inside this /8, more specifically 18.145.0.0/16, was transferred to Amazon.
I did it! I read the whole article. And so did everybody who read the summary.
Nobody envisioned more than a few thousand computers on the Internet. The notion that hundreds of millions would be limiting was ridiculous.
Technically, just the MIT LCS lab, not even the whole school, had the A block.
DEC also had a class A address block for a while. HP got this, plus their own, when they bought DEC. At one point, HP had twice as many IP addresses than China.
The Internet grew way more than any of the founders thought. 4 billion addresses seemed huge back then. Look at the List of assigned A blocks and how A blocks were thrown around in the early days.
Someone traded 10.0.0.0/8 for it. MIT got a deal, because like /. UIDs, lower numbered ones are better!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Internet Society: "Folks in the developing world can't get IP addresses for their servers and gateway routers and you guys are just sitting on yours. Now c'mon!"
In the same regard, Xerox no longer owns all of 13.0.0.0/8 either. Amazon has a piece of that pie, too.
https://whois.arin.net/rest/or...
Needs an "M" in there for "misleading". MIT hasn't released the entire /8 back to ARIN; AFAICT from whois queries they've transfered a whole bunch of /16s (20+) directly over to Amazon, all of which are above the 18.145.0.0 line. Given the highly non-contiguous allocations across the upper half of the /8 range the most likely cause is that they've received chunk of cash for giving Amazon all the /16s that they were not currently actively using.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
MIT claimed all of 18.x.x.x early on and just held onto them. When I was there in 2007, I believe they let my frat have full control of all of 18.236.x.x, no subnets required, for 40 guys.
For those interested, Wikipedia has an amusing list of original A level IP assignments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Because IPv4 was designed as a limited proof of concept, with IPv6 being the properly designed replacement.
IPv4 was supposed to be deader than a can of SPAM by Y2K, and as historical as stacks of punch cards at this point.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Ford still seems to own 19...
Halliburton, Eli Lilly, U Michigan, Prudential, Merck are some of the more notable assignees.
Some of these must be subnetted and farmed out, but IPv4 is destined for obscurity, so why bother?
Still, reading RFCs and seeing Jon Postel's name makes me want to tear up. Miss him.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For the last 25 years or so I've been using "traceroute -n 18.0.0.1" as a quick and dirty way to see what the route "outside" looks like (because that assignment was one of the most "permanent" features of the Internet). It's a right move, to be sure - there is absolutely no reason MIT should control that many addresses. Just a small piece of nostalgia. Still can traceroute though ;)
https://gist.github.com/simons...
"Fourteen million of these IPv4 addresses have not been used, and we have concluded that at least eight million are excess and can be sold without impacting our current or future needs, up to the point when IPv6 becomes universal and address scarcity is no longer an issue. The Institute holds a block of 20 times 10^30 (20 nonillion) IPv6 addresses.
"As part of our upgrade to IPv6, we will be consolidating our in-use IPv4 address space to facilitate the sale of MIT’s excess IPv4 capacity. Net proceeds from the sale will cover our network upgrade costs, and the remainder will provide a source of endowed funding for the Institute to use in furthering its academic and research mission.
--
There is a lot of expensive real-estate tied up in these "8-blocks"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
HP, by virtue of their acquisition of the assets of DEC, has 2 8-blocks, which is probably worth a small fortune in real money. 33 million IP4 addresses.
Most (all?) of these were reserved in the great IP address land grab back in the early 90s.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The internet back then was mostly dialup. Even most schools would exchange email/news with each other via automated dialup at night when phone rates were lower. Consequently, most of the Internet traffic was store-and-forward. You sent an email, your mail server dialed up your school's computer and delivered the mail to them. The school's computer would hold it until night, when it would dial out to the main university in the area and deliver your mail. The university computer, being a minor hub would dial out more frequently, so after say an hour it would dial out to the man hub in the region and deliver your mail.
The main hubs were the ones with always-on dedicated links to other major hubs. They were the ones which got the class A subnets. It made sense because then they could then parcel out the IP addresses to the minor hubs and spokes as they saw fit, and thus DNS resolution could always be handled locally (and thus immediately). For those of you who weren't on the Internet back then, because data was mostly being transmitted as store-and-forward, email typically was only slightly faster than postal mail (usually took a few hours to days to reach someone on another continent), and DNS changes could take up to a week to propagate through the entire Internet. So being able to resolve DNS changes locally quickly was a big deal.
Apple needs to shed a few, as well. They own 17.0.0.0/8
I had a sucky sig.
LOL at HP.
15.0.0.0/7
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Good. Very few organizations actually need a /8.
The US military has several. No point. Free them up!
Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/
Mod up (+1, Facial)
FTFY.
Central Ohio Home Theater Installation - The Theater People
The internet wasn't even public. If they had known Al Gore and the other "Atari Democrats" in Congress were going to come along and spend money opening it to the world, they would have started with something like IPv6. We got IPv4 because it was only for institutional communication and research. MIT is big on both of those, they do lots of work for government, for industry, and in collaboration with other institutions, in addition to their world-renowned research programs.
In that environment, anybody important enough to even plug in could get a /8. People these days still don't understand what the internet is, no wonder we're out of IPv4 addresses! If the average idiot they let plug in now understood the resource, we wouldn't even be running out of IPv4 addresses for years. We have to switch to IPv6, because the commons is a tragedy.
Here's the changelog from the ARIN list if anyone's interested:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-issued/2017-April/003050.html
I know they are important and they protect the "world" but if they could release a couple of them that would lower the cost of everyone that need to have a server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or, let's just all migrate to IPv6 and be done with this.
15.0.0.0/7
CIDR does not work like that!
Or ... thatsthejoke.jpg?
14.0.0.0/8 and 15.0.0.0/8 could be combined to 14.0.0.0/7 (or 15.0.0.0/7 if you prefer). 15 and 16 can't be combined. Do it in binary and it will be more obvious.
Ice worked in the it dept at two separate universities in the past that have given out public IP addresses to all of their wired computers. I guess when ip's were plentiful (ipv4) and security wasn't all that big, that was OK. These days though, everyone is firewalling up, and handing out internal addresses it makes no sense to continue paying for all that ip range.
I have, like, TONS of 192.168.x.x addresses and I only use a few. How can I sell the rest?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I still use punch cards. It's just so much easier to reorder lines of code that way. Also, the NSA has a harder time snooping on my card decks and I've never gotten a virus from a card sneaked into the deck by an intruder. It is, however, getting harder and harder to get my 029 serviced and running in top notch condition.
My stupid joke.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I used to hang out at the batch terminal at college. Because one of the top cards in the punched deck fed into the card reader was the password card. So it was one of the most likely cards to get mangled and end up in the wastebasket.
I got a lot of free computer time that way.
Have gnu, will travel.
15.0.0.0 is not /7-aligned. 14.0.0.0/7 and 16.0.0.0/7 are valid, but 15.0.0.0/7 is not.
Even if 15.0.0.0/7 were valid CIDR notation, it would include 14.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255, not 15.0.0.0 - 16.255.255.255 as was intended.
Back in the good old days when the Internet was used mainly for colleges and government agencies. These colleges will reserve large blocks for themselves. I went to a small college and they had a Class B and two Class C IP address ranges (Back in the time Class B was X.X.0.0 and Class C was X.X.X.0) giving the colleges more than enough IP address for the who institution. Hack in the late 1990's every PC was connected to an unprotected Static IP address for their PCs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, this is entirely on ARIN rather than ICANN these days, and they absolutely allow transfer of IPv4 space for money (subject to a few criteria) and have done so for some time as part of their approach to dealing with IPv4 exhaustion. There's also nothing to say that these IPs have never been used by MIT - for all we know they were previously in use but have been freed up as part of MIT's IPv6 rollout - and since Amazon needs IPv4 space for their growing cloud platforms and can clearly afford this many IPs in one go it makes sense for MIT and Amazon to do a deal rather than parcel them out piecemeal to multiple users.
IPv4 space has been a resource with a sell by date for some time; at some point (probably still some way off) IPv6 will gain critical mass and the value of IPv4 space will plummet, but until then its basically a game of chicken against that unpredicatable deadline. You can sell now, and maybe get $10/IP (for suitably large allocations), or you can wait a bit longer and gamble on either making more money for your IP space as people get more desperate, or wiping out because IPv6 has finally taken off and demand for IPv4 space has dropped. MIT could easily have held on to the IPs for a few more years, and would likely have make a lot more as a result, but by doing a deal now they've actually helped Amazon grow their cloud and put the IPs into productive use again. Sure, MIT likely made a lot of money on the deal, but that's still better than having the IP space sitting around doing nothing at all.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Because in the early days the Internet had an 8 bit network field and a 24 bit host field. So every network got what was later called a "class A" and even later called a "/8".
Some of those allocations were reclaimed when networks shut down, but MIT kept a network running continuously, so they were able to keep their allocation.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The thing is the IANA (and by extension the RIRs) only have power because the cabel of backbone operations (at least one of which owns a couple of /8 blocks) say they do. Attempting to forciblly reclaim addresses like you propose could well cause major backbone operators to tell IANA to go fuck themselves. Having different providers disagree on who is the rightful owner of addresses is not good for anyone.
Yes a market based approach means a few early adopters got a moderately large chunk of money for doing very little but it also means that "hoarded" addresses get brought into service without the use of force that could smash the Internet to peices.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
IPv6 is fundamentally not very different from IPv4. Yes there were a load of half-baked ideas from the IPv6 proponents but you don't have to use them. If you want you can use DHCPv6 in stateful mode and even use NAT66 to run IPv6 in almost exactly the same way you run IPv4. Yes there are issues with features such as port security on switches but that is because port security is in itself a hack and therefore needs to be updated for IPv6.
Running dual-stack however is a massive PITA. Basically it means you have to set everything up twice and every machine has two identities. Introducing yet another new protocol to the mess isn't going to help anything.
I think we are set up for a long and painful period where some networks are dual stack, some are v6 only, some are v4 only and the v6-only networks talk to the v4-only networks through various types of transition mechanisms.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hoarding the addresses wasn't against any rules because when those addresses were allocated the rules didn't exist and the rules were not applied retroactively to existing allocations only to new allocations made under the new rules.
Selling the addresses might have been against rules in the past (the legal status of early allocations was never very clear) but nowadays the three biggest RIRs are open to the idea of selling IP addresses subject to some conditions. Presumably MIT came to a deal with ARIN to allow this split/sale.
The market approach to handling IP addresses is probably the least bad option at this point. As the price rises people will re-evaluate what services truly need a public IPv4 address and what services can make do with a more economical option.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
IPv6 has already gained critical mass. The CDNs are all turning on IPv6. The wireless ISPs are delivering the Internet over IPv6 today translating connections to IPv4 to talk to legacy servers. Sensible fixed line ISPs are delivering IPv6 today as it cuts down the CGN costs. The biggest players on the Internet are using IPv6 only internally translating connections to IPv4 to talk to legacy servers. IPv6 is not going away. It will just grow and grow.
When a home becomes IPv6 enabled (basically replace the CPE with one that supports both IPv4 and IPv6) most of the traffic switches to IPv6.
Because there was already a protocol whose assigned protocol number is 5?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.