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Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

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Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#51

Post by aparks517 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41
xoa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the point is that they're not using it. If it's not addressable from the internet, why not use 10.0.0.0/8 instead?

For some applications, it's valuable to have globally-unique addresses even if they're not (all) broadly accessible from the open Internet. For example, if you're building private links between networks which don't share an authority for distributing private network addresses (they're administered by different companies or organizations perhaps). I don't know how common this is anymore, but I've seen it in the past.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#52

Post by gertrunde »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41
xoa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the point is that they're not using it. If it's not addressable from the internet, why not use 10.0.0.0/8 instead?

It's not relevant whether or not it's accessible from the internet.

And that 9/8 allocation predates RFC1918 by at least four years.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#53

Post by Tsiklon »

emilecantin wrote: post #14

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.

At the same time frame HP did the same with their /8 IIRC

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#54

Post by api »

Interesting work, but IMHO anything that extends the life of IPv4 does active harm. I'd prefer if these addresses stay out of the pool so scarcity increases and forces people to upgrade.

IPv4 is fundamentally too small, period. There are already more people and computers on Earth than possible IPv4 addresses even if it were perfectly optimally used. It leads us further down a path in which everything is behind increasingly starved NATs, making point to point connectivity more and more difficult. Now we are seeing NATs in front of carrier-grade NAT and other madness.

... and no, NAT is not a security feature. You can and almost always do have a firewall in front of IPv6. If you really want NAT there is IPv6 NAT, but it allows you to have all mappings be 1:1 eliminating the need for port starvation madness and making P2P always work. All internal IPs get their own external IP, but those can be random and rotated if you want.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#55

Post by thereddaikon »

kevincox wrote: post #9
thedougd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really what the author was getting at. The VPC endpoints just provide a way (via TLS certificate authority logs) for the author to discover DNS addresses that they can then use to check for queries and determine what IP addresses are being used in private networks. They found a number of AWS users that are treating publicly routable IP space as their own private IP space. If someone were to ever offer a pu…

I agree with you in general. If you do expect to be able to connect to the public internet and map an endpoint over a public address you are aiming a gun at your foot. However the point I was trying to make was about this quote: > This is useful since it can remove the need for some servers to have any outbound internet access at all. My point is that if you are not connected to the public internet at all I don't see…

>My point is that if you are not connected to the public internet at all I don't see why you should be expected to follow the rules of the public internet (who owns what). You can use whatever rules you want for your own private network.

Hypothetically if you were dealing with a network that had zero access to the outside world then you are right, it doesn't matter. You can use whatever IPs you want and it wouldn't make a difference.

Its a bit of a moot point though since outside of niche situations like high security air gapped networks you don't really see that scenario anymore. Yes, the network at a nuclear missile silo could do that but everyone else is connected to the internet.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#56

Post by numpad0 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41
xoa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the point is that they're not using it. If it's not addressable from the internet, why not use 10.0.0.0/8 instead?

Why 10.0.0.0/8 is as it is now and why IBM used to be 9.0.0.0/8 in the first place?

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#57

Post by angulardragon03 »

taubek wrote: post #46

At University where I was working until few years ago we all have had static IP addresses for all of our desktops/laptops.

My old uni holds two /16s which are used for clients. Firewalled, but if you use the Wi-Fi there then you are getting your own "personal" IPv4 address per device.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#58

Post by ospzfmbbzr »

cameronh90 wrote: post #22
dublin wrote: 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…

Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with. Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine.

> Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with.

Assuming it's configured correctly. Most devices are not.

> Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine.

Why would you ever want publicly routable addresses on devices inside your home?

If Ipv6 was simply a 64-bit quad improvement on IPv4 it would be fine. However, the only valid use cases I can think of are mostly to the benefit of end users.

What possible need could anyone have for more address space than the non-routable private address blocks already afforded by IPv4? Throw in the insecure-by-default and frequent misconfiguration out-of-the-box and you have the current flaming security dumpster fire that is IPv6.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#59

Post by jeroenhd »

angulardragon03 wrote: post #57
taubek wrote: post #46

At University where I was working until few years ago we all have had static IP addresses for all of our desktops/laptops.

My old uni holds two /16s which are used for clients. Firewalled, but if you use the Wi-Fi there then you are getting your own "personal" IPv4 address per device.

I know several universities that do the same. On certain LANs there isn't even a firewall, you just get a public IP. At my current university I think there's a limit of five or six static allocations per person, the rest is all dynamically allocated (and still a normal IP, no NAT here).

And I honestly don't see why not. This is how the internet was designed to be used, and it works a lot better than most large managed networks in the 10/8 range I've seen. It'll only be a problem once there are more students and services than there is address space.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#60

Post by jeroenhd »

hellow22 wrote: post #19

IPv4 address space is in short supply, so some people decide to use IP space ( allocated, but not advertised) that doesn't belong to them. The consequences are pretty well described in the article you quote.

But this address space is non-routable, so it's effectively using address space that's equivalent to a 10/8 or 172/12 or 192.168/16 address. There's no need to grab random /8s when there is plenty of IPv4 address space that won't ever get routed to the internet (assuming nobody does something as dumb as actually changing the 127/8 semantics). If they somehow run out of those, 100.64/10 is also pretty much guaranteed not to be reachable from the internet.
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