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MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

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Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#31
post #24

For the uninitiated, can someone give a brief explanation of what that means?

Computers on the internet are pointed to by special numbers. Usually the special numbers look like 4 numbers with '.' like 123.45.67.89 Each of those 4 numbers can be between 0 and 255 so (to be more simple) the lowest special number would be 0.0.0.0 and the highest would be 255.255.255.255.

Back when the internet was still young, you would go to ARIN (the American Registry of Internet Numbers) and say "I think I need 256 special numbers" and they would give you a block of 256 of them. Something like 1.2.3.0 - 1.2.3.255. If you asked for about 65,000 special they might give you 231.45.0.0 through 231.45.255.255.

MIT (the Massachusettes Institute of Technology in Boston, MA, USA) was one of the first people to ask for special numbers and so asked for over 16,000,000 of them (this was 1/256 of all of them) and so MIT was given 18.0.0.0-18.255.255.255.

Now today, all of the special numbers have given to people and companies. This makes each special number extra special and large groups of special numbers very extra special. Since MIT had 16,000,000 of the special numbers all next to each other, they decided to sell half of their special numbers for a lot of money.

Edit: Simple English: https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#32
post #22

That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. Last time I was at the MIT media lab for a conference, I was able to get an unfirewalled external ip address from their wireless network. It was amazing. I briefly streamed live audio of a talk via shoutcast, but of course, nobody uses that stuff anymore. It really makes you ponder what a…

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS.

This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support.

I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can find an ISP that supports IPv6 quite a few of them (maybe all?) support prefix delegation. A /64 isn't uncommon from ISPs in Seattle.

No friend of mine is on ipv6. No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6. Having an ipv6 prefix is useless to me (as someone that is behind the abomination called CGNAT / 'Dual Stack Lite').

iOS supports IPv6, and has done for some time:

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=05042016a

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can find an ISP that supports IPv6 quite a few of them (maybe all?) support prefix delegation. A /64 isn't uncommon from ISPs in Seattle.

No friend of mine is on ipv6. No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6. Having an ipv6 prefix is useless to me (as someone that is behind the abomination called CGNAT / 'Dual Stack Lite').

My T-Mobile (US) Android phone definitely supports IPv6 - but only as a native device, not as a hotspot. Anything that connects to the hotspot gets an RFC1918 address with NAT.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#36
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can find an ISP that supports IPv6 quite a few of them (maybe all?) support prefix delegation. A /64 isn't uncommon from ISPs in Seattle.

No friend of mine is on ipv6. No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6. Having an ipv6 prefix is useless to me (as someone that is behind the abomination called CGNAT / 'Dual Stack Lite').

> No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6.

T-Mobile LTE has been exclusively IPv6 on most phones for some time now. I'm pretty sure other mobile providers have done the same or are in the process of doing so.

All my Android devices have supported IPv6 as long as I've had it running on my network. I don't have an iOS device but since T-Mobile sells them I assume they work with IPv6.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#37
post #11

Does HP still own 15/8 and 16/8? I remember visiting there once and everyone had public internet addresses.

It appears so. (HPE specifically.) Hewlett-Packard had an original /8 and acquired another that was Digital Equipment's by way of Compaq.

Stanford had a /8 like MIT but they sold that off [edit: or gave it back] a while back.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS. This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support. I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunn…

Rogers in Canada gives /64, which is lovely.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind…

I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS. This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support. I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunn…

That doesn't sound correct. Are you absolutely sure you aren't also getting a prefix delegation thru DHCPv6? That's currently the common way to provide IPv6 connectivity currently for residential users.

From what I remember hearing, Comcast was giving /60s thru PD.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#40
post #11

Does HP still own 15/8 and 16/8? I remember visiting there once and everyone had public internet addresses.

"public" in the sense of theoretically routable, yes, but most of them were firewalled off, so they might as well have been RFC1918 addresses for all the good it did you.

The worst part about getting 16/8 from Compaq was that it wasn't contiguous address space, so you couldn't use a single netmask for both. :(

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