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Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

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Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#151

Post by Melatonic »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #45
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…

Of a highly constrained resource, they're using a tiny fraction of what they've been given. That's a weird definition of "using what they have." If I asked for a class C for my business running a local corner store, I'd be looked at like I was crazy. IBM gets 16 million public IPs and it's cool? Yeah, I know you can't perfectly use an IP space, but with 128 offices, IBM could give each office an allocation of around…

Everyone was talking about domain name squatting but turns out its been IP addresses this whole time :-D

But that does definitely seem like an excessive amount for them to own. I would guess the huge swathes the government has reserved are not exactly being used to their potential either.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#152

Post by giantrobot »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #69
KennyBlanken wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of a highly constrained resource, they're using a tiny fraction of what they've been given. That's a weird definition of "using what they have." If I asked for a class C for my business running a local corner store, I'd be looked at like I was crazy. IBM gets 16 million public IPs and it's cool? Yeah, I know you can't perfectly use an IP space, but with 128 offices, IBM could give each office an allocation of around…

IBM was the original "cloud"... AKA mainframes. They had a LOT of addressed services for decades (still do). If you want to pick on a company for hogging IPv4 space, pick on Apple. They have a /8 and probably aren't using any of it.

> If you want to pick on a company for hogging IPv4 space, pick on Apple. They have a /8 and probably aren't using any of it.

Most (if not all) of Apple's infrastructure uses their /8 block. With Apple Park they've moved to using a 10/8 with NAT for talking to the outside. Between iCloud, iTMS/App Store, and iMessage Apple's got a non-trivial amount of global network infrastructure beyond just their corporate network.

So I guess be mad at Apple for using their IP space?

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#153

Post by Melatonic »

atkbrah wrote: 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.

Supposedly they do use some of it for honeypotting schemes but I imagine some of it is out of paranoia

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#154

Post by rhplus »

> At the time of writing the market price for an IPv4 address is around 50 USD

That's quite an outperforming asset class if true [0].

For a point of comparison, Microsoft paid $11 per address in 2011[1]. To get to $50 is about 15% appreciation/year, plus the added benefit of being able to rent them out by the minute. This article estimates that Amazon has paid about $25 per address in recent years [2].

[0] https://auctions.ipv4.global/

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-buys-nortels-vin...

[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-has-hoarded-billions-o...

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#155

Post by erik_seaberg »

kart23 wrote: post #96
digisign wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't many of those be on NATs?

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?

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#156

Post by [deleted] »

ipaddr wrote: post #131
atkbrah wrote: 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.

How does this scale to other military globally. Does anyone else have an /8 block?

[deleted]

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#157

Post by kube-system »

Melatonic wrote: post #153
atkbrah wrote: 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.

Supposedly they do use some of it for honeypotting schemes but I imagine some of it is out of paranoia

Most of it is probably just because they invented IPv4, and were therefore able to keep as much as they wanted.

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#158

Post by erik_seaberg »

kevincox wrote: post #10
quickthrower2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I have a question then. If you squat as per this definition, can you divert internet traffic designated foe the real IP address to your server? Or does it only divert it for computers on your network?

The author is only talking about private networks. This does however occasionally happen on the public internet (or when a government turns their country into a private network and does this maliciously). The most common source is "BGP Leaks" which is a fun search.

My favorite example is when a Turkish ISP accidentally declared themselves to be the best route to anywhere, and the whole Internet simply took their word for it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080228131639/http://www.renesy...

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#159

Post by jrockway »

wmf wrote: post #135
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.

IBM owned 9/8 so this is a legitimate use of address space. All hosts should have globally unique addresses, even if you want to use NAT to hide various things. IBM does multiple acquisitions per year. Imagine merging two corporate networks that both use 10/8; it's a nightmare.

> Imagine merging two corporate networks that both use 10/8; it's a nightmare.

This is a nightmare even inside companies. Two teams set up a default VPC, and one day you go to peer them and find that the IP ranges conflict. At my last job, I ended up using Netbox to manage our private IP ranges alongside our public IP ranges. (In theory, it would be nice if cloud providers offered this feature. "8 other VPCs on this account also use 10.0.0.0/8. Are you sure you want to be the 9th?")

Re: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

#160

Post by epc »

wmf wrote: post #135
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.

IBM owned 9/8 so this is a legitimate use of address space. All hosts should have globally unique addresses, even if you want to use NAT to hide various things. IBM does multiple acquisitions per year. Imagine merging two corporate networks that both use 10/8; it's a nightmare.

I do not know IBM’s current practice but in the 1990s acquisitions continued to use their internal networking for quite a long time, just interconnecting the networks as necessary and announcing routes internally.

9. addresses only started being used widely inside IBM around 1992 as the internal multi protocol network rolled out (combining RSCS over SNA and TCP/IP). As APPC connected devices gave way to TCP/IP connected devices allocations shot upward, IIRC each major campus was a /16.

Advantis/IBM Global Network ran the 9 network on the same physical and logical circuits as the public networks they managed, leading me to bypass the IBM firewall unintentionally multiple times as the filters they used broke. This may be one of the reasons RFC1918 addresses were discouraged (at least through 12/2001 when I left).

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