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Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

blog.benjojo.co.uk

31–40 of 208 posts

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#32
post #2

One minor philosophical question. If you are using AWS PrivateLink because your VPC is not connected to the internet are you really squatting anything? You are just aren't using the public internet. This means that you own the entire address space and can decide what you want to do with it. Of course it still may make sense to stick to ranges you own in case you need to peer your VPC with someone else, but I don't se…

I believe the networking term is "bogon". Basically you're using space in a way that isn't intended. Mostly I've seen it as people trying to use RFC1918 space on public networks probably because of misconfigurations and most routers/FWs will ignore these. This is sort of the inverse.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#33
post #16

There is still plenty of IPv4 space available, it's just very badly distributed, for instance, due to early limits in Cisco's IOS, Chevron acquired an insane 26 Class B address blocks when connecting to the net back in the early 90s! With CIDR, we can easily reuse the many unused addrs like those, but the pain of readdressing has their owners sitting on them, raising prices and making them even more reluctant to turn…

> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used

How so? The network-prefix portion of IPv6 is 64 bits, which is a pretty conservative extension of ipv4. Everything after that is under the control of end users, so nothing's stopping them from manually assigning simple ::1, ::2 etc. values for the host identifier part - or whatever addressing scheme happens to be most convenient for any given application.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#34

About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside. I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Was it still behind NAT?

Since it can’t be routed globally the return path almost certainly has to be NATd to something globally routable.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#35

About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside. I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Doesn't IBM own the 9.0.0.0/8 netblock?

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#36
post #29

About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside. I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Apple was the same when I was there for 17.0.0.0/8

I thought apple owned the 17.0.0.0/8 netblock?

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#37

About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside. I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Why would that be relevant here (or sibling comment about Apple)? Last I checked except for 9.9.9.0/24 (to quad9) IBM is indeed the assignee for 9.0.0.0/8 from back in 1992. Apple got 17.0.0.0/8 back in 1990. Back in the day a lot of big entities got whole /8 blocks (including of course a lot of the USG but private corps as well). Many of them are still around and fully active, while others are defunct (Halliburton had a /8 and that went back to ARIN then out to registries) and/or have shifted (like IIRC Amazon now has 3.0.0.0/8 but that was General Electric originally). That's not squatting, that's just making use of what they have.

>I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Why should they stop? Ideally we'd have had at least 64-bit or better 128-bit from the beginning in a nicer form then IPv6 ended up and then every single one of us could have millions of IPs if we wished. That isn't how it ended up but that doesn't mean those who got them shouldn't use them. I make use of my minuscule bit of public IPv4 for my own stuff.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#38
post #16

There is still plenty of IPv4 space available, it's just very badly distributed, for instance, due to early limits in Cisco's IOS, Chevron acquired an insane 26 Class B address blocks when connecting to the net back in the early 90s! With CIDR, we can easily reuse the many unused addrs like those, but the pain of readdressing has their owners sitting on them, raising prices and making them even more reluctant to turn…

> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used; and second, even most people reading this, tech people in a tech forum, struggle to really grasp the inane IPv6 address shortening rules!

I have been using IPv6 for at least twelve years and I will agree that at first - maybe the first six months or year - I found these things confusing. But I think your assertion is based on lack of familiarity. Fundamentally, IPv6 works well, and just needs some open-minded people to spend time with it.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#39
post #37

About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside. I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.

Why would that be relevant here (or sibling comment about Apple)? Last I checked except for 9.9.9.0/24 (to quad9) IBM is indeed the assignee for 9.0.0.0/8 from back in 1992. Apple got 17.0.0.0/8 back in 1990. Back in the day a lot of big entities got whole /8 blocks (including of course a lot of the USG but private corps as well). Many of them are still around and fully active, while others are defunct (Halliburton h…

> Why would that be relevant here

Because it shows how wasteful these companies operate with resources others are in need of.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#40
A couple of years ago Amazon bought four million ip addresses for $108 million dollars. 44.192.0.0/10

AMPRnet sold them a quarter of the ip addresses that were allocated for amateur radio. They got a /8 back in the 1980s. A small number of addresses were used for ham radio networks but the AMPRnet addresses were generally not routed between the internet and the radio networks.

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