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Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

blog.benjojo.co.uk

181–190 of 208 posts

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#181
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yes, I think the 50EUR should be put on a ladder scale so hoarders get charged exponentially more. ;-) They would just start to put IPV4 blocks behind shell companies.

Which is essentially what is already happening. There was a minor uproar, that seems to have died out, on the RIPE address policy working group listserv over companies and individuals signing up for multiple RIPE accounts (called LIRs) to be able to get multiple /24 allocations from the waiting list. People register multiple LIRs primarily because the cost of signing up for a RIPE account--prior to 2022, it was a 2,0…

“Can’t be transferred” is hard to enforce on something that can be owned by a company, which itself can be sold.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is essentially what is already happening. There was a minor uproar, that seems to have died out, on the RIPE address policy working group listserv over companies and individuals signing up for multiple RIPE accounts (called LIRs) to be able to get multiple /24 allocations from the waiting list. People register multiple LIRs primarily because the cost of signing up for a RIPE account--prior to 2022, it was a 2,0…

“Can’t be transferred” is hard to enforce on something that can be owned by a company, which itself can be sold.

Which was one of the several points raised on the discussion at the time along with the idea that it would only embolden the address speculators trying to use the waitlist. The theory was that the speculators would go to the trouble of making shell companies or "gaming" a transfer as part of a merger-and-acquisition, while so-called legitimate users would either not bother or would just go to the secondary market from the beginning.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#183
post #98

US Department of Defense has 14 /8 blocks. You'd have to wonder what they do with that large number of public IPs. Sure, some companies have large blocks but that's nothing compared to that.

The DoD is also larger than any company.

By employees it’s the largest, though if Walmart bought McDonalds they’d have more employees (and perhaps as many chemical weapons).

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#184
post #129
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont disagree, there might-should be clawback provisions for those legacy allocations. But how do you define 'use' they could easily 'use' them by simply announcing them via BGP and null routing the traffic to the IP's they don't want exposed? The end answer is still IPv6, where everyone can have as much or as little IP space as they want.

> But how do you define 'use' Can they make a plausible spreadsheet showing use. But, clawback of IP allocations is very rare, even for allocations that were made with agreements allowing it. There's some high profile cases relating to fraud, but otherwise nope. Legacy allocations would be nice to clean up, but if it's not voluntary, it's not happening. And at this point, if it happens, it's probably going to be a sa…

Yeah, I don't really disagree - I think the realistic future is IPv6 - even though my ISP doesn't do dual stack on its business circuits.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a word where any medium sized company could just get a /20 network and any enterprise could get a /8 I would agree, but with IPv4 we live in a world where the vast majority of companies don't have anything but 10/8 (and a couple of IPs for public facing stuff). The only real options besides 10/8 are to have been big at the advent of the internet (like IBM or Apple) or misappropriate one of those IP blocks in the h…

There's a real option: IPv6 and 464XLAT

So use no IPv4s at all? Well that still falls under "all the addresses you assign to machines are real global addresses"

I'm sure it's a fine option now but that RFC is pretty new.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#186
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean they are using IP's as they were originally designed? Those people probably have NO conflicts or problems with things like video conferencing, VPN's, etc. NAT is a cludge, not a security feature.

I can't recall the last time that NAT caused me any problems. Is it still an issue these days?

The modern CGNAT version is. This very week I tried to play an old game with a friend and had trouble.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#187
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…

What should be done is charging fixed rate fee per IPv4 address. Maybe there's a problem that developed countries are too rich.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#188
post #74
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By analogy, domain squatting isn't using a domain that isn't yours, it's underutilizing a limited resource that's assigned to you. Using IPs for internal networking doesn't necessarily mean under utilizing though; but might not be enough to justify such an assignment today.

I dont disagree, there might-should be clawback provisions for those legacy allocations. But how do you define 'use' they could easily 'use' them by simply announcing them via BGP and null routing the traffic to the IP's they don't want exposed? The end answer is still IPv6, where everyone can have as much or as little IP space as they want.

I feel like null routing would obviously not count as use.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#189
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?

Here's a little different approach to the issue: because IBM is using IP addresses the way they were intended. Private IP ranges are not a good thing, they are a necessary evil.

NAT was developed as essentially a hack, originally more to solve tricky routing situations, but later more to allow broad use of reserved range IPs. But the original intent was always that all hosts would have a unique address, regardless of where they were or were not reachable form (or advertised to). This is a significantly better situation than the modern world of widespread use of reserved ranges and NAT, because it meant that there would not be addressing conflicts even between two private networks. Or, more practically, it meant that setting up tunneled connectivity (VPN, MPLS, whatever) between networks not advertised to the public internet always works properly, because those networks are using IP addressing as intended and thus can simply advertise their routes to each other.

Private IP ranges for "private" hosts are an adaptation to the limitations of IPv4 space, not any kind of design ideal. It's an awkward solution to a bad problem that makes numerous real-world IT situations more difficult, most commonly the case of setting up VPNs between private networks and being forced to introduce NAT because they are both using overlapping private IP space.

A very common but small example of this is the need to choose "unusual" private IP prefixes for VPN networks (like 10.106.41.0/24 or something else sort of randomly selected), because if you use something "simple" like 192.168.1.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/24 you are 100% guaranteed to run into route conflicts because of people's home and small business networks using these ranges internally. If everyone used properly allocated IPs, even on private networks, we simply wouldn't have this problem!

IPv6 offers us a bit of a reset opportunity since it was designed to have enough /64s available to allow use on private networks. Hopefully people understand this and use IPv6 the way it was intended!

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#190
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dorms and wifi should definitely be NAT. you can always give a public address if someone specifically requests it.

Do dorms have IPv6? If students can’t run servers, where does the next generation of developers come from?

I tried running a Pi in my college dorm. First, it was NAT, and when I requested a public IP, IT said they didn't give IPs to students. :/

IPv6 would be cool.

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