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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

#61
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…

IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#62
post #44

Letter to MIT community: https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e... tl;dr MIT is selling off half of 18.0.0.0/8 (8 million IPs)

heh, so they got the 18/8 for free, refused to replace /8 with /16 like other universities did to help relieve IP shortage, but then they simply sold the 8 millions of the addresses for profit, while still hugging to remaining 8 million, even though that their student body size is only ~11,200. I guess that's good for them, but it's still a dick behavior.

Technically it also helps whoever they sold it to. (One side effect of speculation is that stuff gets held in reserve until someone really needs it. :-)

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#63
post #56

xkcd explained what a mess the allocations were ages ago: https://xkcd.com/195/

I guess that's just human nature, we are doing similar with IPv6 right now. The smallest allocation for IPv6 is /64 that's 1.84467440737096E19 addresses.

Only similar if you ignore that there are 2^64 available /64s. We're never going to be in danger of running out, so the use of /64s allows potentially interesting application of the host part of the address (uses so far include stateless autoconfiguration and privacy addresses).

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#64
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…

"carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network."

I'm planning on doing exactly this using openvpn as my transport (because I already have an extensive ipv4 openvpn system). Has anyone tried it? I'm not interested so much in how to do it, which I think I know, but in anecdotes along the lines of "it makes openvpn crash" or "linode told me I was being abusive and cut me off" or whatever.

I've had ipv6 for decades I guess. I even got one of the Hurricane Electric "sage" tee shirts last decade. But when sixxs goes down I lose ipv6 connectivity for the first time since the DSL days at the turn of the century.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#65
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…

IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.

Guy who manages a two-dozen site v6 network with tens of thousands of clients here. What issues are you referring to?

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#66
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…

IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.

The question is, will people get the joke?

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#67

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…

Many universities still own generous blocks, though historically there were possibly many more[1]. My university, Caltech, still has the 131.215.0.0 - 131.215.255.255 block and has student dorms, graduate student housing, and office buildings wired up exactly as you describe. They also happen to own the 134.4.0.0 - 134.4.255.255 block, though I have never seen an actual server used there linked externally or internally.

[1] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=339445

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#68

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…

>I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. MIT student body size: ~11,200 Unique IPs on this block: ~16.7 MILLION. That's ~1500 unique IPs per student.[1] >Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers. Well, they're still keeping a whole boatload and IPv6 is here, so you're lamenting a scenario that isn't ac…

> MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history.

Good. I didn't realize how many ip addresses they have. I think that universities are endowed with finite resources like land or ip addresses have a responsibility to make them available to students and fellows, and by extension, improve society.

Selling everything to the highest bidder isn't something I want to see done.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#69

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…

Given ipv4 exhaustion I'm not sure the pros outweigh the cons but your post just triggered some happy long forgotten memories.

Manchester Uni (circa ~2001) as part of JANET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET) had unmetered, unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet ports straight into all the dorm rooms, each with a dynamic public IP on the end. A publicly routable 100MBit line back then was a big deal (the fastest connection I could get at my parents was a bonded ISDN line).

It was thanks to that that I first started playing around with linux (RedHat 5 or 6 back then iirc). I remember assembling a server box with cheap PC parts, hosting an FTP (...posting the Dyn domain for it to alt.2600 and later getting in trouble after the uni received a letter from Universal :), running audiogalaxy satellite 24/7, setting up an IRC server for me and my friends to co-ordinate Quake 2 games (or counter strike - can't remember), trying (and failing) to do my own email with qmail and all sorts of other fun stuff I've forgotten. Good times.

Re: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

#70
post #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 nee…

I'm so old that I predate CIDR and in the old days before netmasks the netmask was essentially implied by the first couple bits of an ip address so all msb zero ip addrs were class A aka /8 allocations. All MSB 00 or whatever it was were class B implying a netmask of 255.255.0.0 aka a /16 allocation.

Before CIDR you couldn't route or advertise rando netmasks like a /9 or a /20. There were no steps between a /16 and a /8 so if you convinced (someone, forget who) that you "need" more than 65K ip addresses (and MIT is big enough to need more, theoretically) then you got a /8.

A lot of noobs think ipv4 rolled out with CIDR; not so. For "a long time" people had to make due with classful routing.

From memory, isn't RIP v1 only classful routing compatible? Been awhile since I used something that old.

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