[HN Gopher] The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 an...
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The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 121 points
Date : 2021-12-06 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.daknob.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.daknob.net)
| cpach wrote:
| Another interesting article that was posted here in October - _32
| Bit Real Estate_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28920269
| jwlake wrote:
| What is the author refering to in this line?
|
| "It also helps to shed some light into this "Network 44" that
| became more famous by recent events ;)"?
| bobowzki wrote:
| The sale of 44.192.0.0/10 to Amazon for $108 million.
| commiefornian wrote:
| Doubling the header size by switching from ipv4 to ipv6 would be
| significant for systems that nearly always run at 1200 baud half-
| duplex or slower and have significant packet loss.
|
| If any of your pings actually routed over the RF link from some
| gateway, it is quite likely that you saturated the link and
| effectively DOSed anyone on the frequency of that link for miles.
| So while it looks like they aren't on the internet, it is because
| you knocked them off of it (and any HAMS attempting to use that
| frequency for any purpose would also have been DOSed).
|
| It makes much more sense for everyone else to move to ipv6. The
| normal internet is many orders of magnitude faster and more
| reliable so leave ipv4 for the slower/higher loss protocols.
| dfawcus wrote:
| Surely trying to ping the HAM portion of 44/8 from the Internet
| is an inherently flawed concept?
|
| Part of the provisions for use (e.g. in the UK) was that only HAM
| traffic (not third party) can be carried over the airways. So if
| it was possible to ping / traceroute the 44/8 net from the
| Internet, the echo requests would be third party traffic.
|
| Hence why most of the radio use has been completely separated
| from the Internet use of this block, essentially disconnected
| VRFs. Some countries may allow for minor volumes of third party
| traffic, and rules may have been related since I was active on
| packet radio.
|
| So the reservation of the 44 net always struck me as more a case
| of enabling a multi-homed HAM operated machine to be connected to
| both the Internet and the radio nets, and picking which to
| connect to based upon that simple address block, but it should
| not be forwarding traffic between the two. One can tunnel radio
| traffic through the Internet, but not vice-versa.
| mprovost wrote:
| In that case since it's not routable from the outside world it
| seems like it would be easier to mandate that the folk using
| this address space all migrate to IPv6 and give back all the v4
| addresses, than it's going to be to convince everyone else to
| switch.
| Marqin wrote:
| Why does insurance company (Prudential) need whole /8 block?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The school district in my town of 25,000 (school enrollment
| ~4,300) has a /21 and a /23. They got them back in the 90s.
| zamadatix wrote:
| /21 and /23 aren't really much, you could just as easily get
| those assigned directly in the late 2000s (in the early to
| mid 2010s it would require some extra paperwork but was still
| doable). Remember the difference in block sizes is 2^(larger-
| smaller).
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Neither network is very big, to be sure, but there's no
| earthly reason why such a small school district needs a /21
| (or, really, a /23). Nobody is going to deploy an IPv4
| network w/o NAT, and their self-hosting needs today are
| minimal. I support a geographically-adjacent school
| district w/ about half the enrollment. At the height of
| self-hosting everything we had fit comfortably in a /28. A
| /24, to facilitate BGP announcement, would be plenty.
|
| (My judgement is, no doubt, clouded by the fact that, for
| the size of companies I work with, a /24 would be an
| embarrassment of riches.)
| zamadatix wrote:
| /24 is hardly an "embarassment of riches" as it's the
| absolute minimum size you can be assigned by a RIR (or
| advertise on the internet).
|
| You can only use /28s and whatnot when you are using
| someone else's (usually a carrier's) addresses as part of
| a larger group in a single route advertisement. In such
| setups reviewing your DMZ logs probably requires looking
| at NAT logs, your entire outbound NAT pool being shared
| amongst all types of traffic, fun with peer ranges
| causing the block to get blacklisted, and similar
| friction as a result.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I am aware that you can't announce anything smaller than
| a /24. I said, "A /24, to facilitate BGP announcement,
| would be plenty." I also know that RIR's don't handle
| allocations that small.
|
| I deal primarily with small businesses who might host a
| VPN to facilitate access to on-prem systems, perhaps a
| web server for on-prem web apps, and in the past perhaps
| an email server. A /24 would be an embarrassment of
| riches for them.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| It's likely they don't, but we're part of that early group of
| companies that moved first. In the article the author mentions
| that /8 was the smallest amount of space that could be
| allocated at the time.
|
| Apple, HP and GE (IIRC) also have/had /8's
| riffic wrote:
| Apple, AT&T, Ford, the USPS, and Comcast all hold /8s as well:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
|
| The United States Department of Defense has _14_ /8 blocks.
| kiallmacinnes wrote:
| Need? They most likely don't need it.
|
| They got it back in the day (prob mid-90's) because they asked
| for it - IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween..
| Now that it's a valuable asset - they are very unlikely to just
| hand it back.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yep. I have my own /24 personally, registered back in the mid
| 90's. I know several other individuals who have them, as
| well. The early Internet was a very different place.
| kingcharles wrote:
| > IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween
|
| This. I would always ask for a whole Class C when I needed
| one IP. A Class C was worthless in the 90s. Just like you
| could buy any dotcom domain you wanted. And mine however many
| Bitcoins you needed in 2010.
| oaiey wrote:
| The interesting part is: Do they know they own it? If yes,
| second Question: Does the IT department own it or the finance
| department own it under the category assets?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Of course they know they known it and track it as an asset.
| It is incredibly valuable.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's not going to make any sense if you ask the question now,
| ask it in 1990. CIDR didn't start until '93 and when they made
| the request in '90 they had a reasonable case a /16 would be
| too small (remember, classful networking times). The WWW hadn't
| even been invented at CERN yet and hardly anybody was using IP
| still even inside the networking space, what else was going to
| be done with IP space if not to assign it?
|
| As for why they still own it places like Amazon which hoover up
| large deaths of space like this must not have made interesting
| enough offers yet. GE sold 3/8 that way in 2018 for example.
| fragmede wrote:
| Amazon also bought up half of MIT's 18/8 in 2017 for an
| undisclosed pile of money.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| How much would a Class A be worth these days?
| hansel_der wrote:
| i'd say about half a billion for the whole /8
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Stealing IP addresses wouldn't make a good Hollywood
| blockbuster (unless it contained action sequences with big
| name stars), but it could be more lucrative than armed bank
| robbery.
| MaysonL wrote:
| I wonder how much IP address embezzlement goes on in big
| companies?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Might be the plot for a cyberpunk thriller. Not sure how
| that genre is doing, since one could argue that it's just
| real life now.
| bauruine wrote:
| A /8 are 16777216 (2^24) addresses and IPs are sold for around
| 50$ each [0] so somewhere around 800 Million.
|
| [0]: https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Ah, so:
|
| Class B: $3 megabucks
|
| Class C: $13k
|
| I know a couple of guys who own roughly a dozen class B's and
| live off the fees from leasing them. One of my old companies
| (now defunct) still holds a Class C that isn't being used and
| doesn't have a proper owner.
| lostlogin wrote:
| How does that price work?
|
| When I buy I static IP I know I don't really own it, but I
| get to use it and it cost about US$10. I'm sure my ISP would
| charge me more if they paid $50 for it.
|
| What am I missing?
| zajio1am wrote:
| Many ISPs acquired IP addresses in the past for free. While
| they could sell them now on open market for $50/IP, it
| makes sense to hold them (as their price is expected to
| rise) and just use them for their customers (for fixed or
| monthly fee).
|
| While technically they could rent them outside, such
| approach is not recommended as they would lose any control
| about how they are used, they can be used for spamming or
| hacking and can get on blacklists, which could damage their
| future selling price.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Presumably you're paying a monthly fee for your ISP, one
| which includes an IP of some sort. It doesn't cost anything
| for an ISP to give you a static address (which likely can
| be removed at their whim) rather than a dynamic address
| given you're likely to be needing an IP 24/7 (as you're the
| sort of person who knows what an IP address is)
|
| If it costs $50 for a single IP, that would be 50 cents a
| month at a decent return on investment (and the value of
| that IP is still increasing), that is part of your monthly
| charge (which I suspect is far more than 50c).
|
| Additionally, if you changed ISP you're going to lose that
| "investment" in your static IP, so you've basically paid
| $10 to lock yourself in.
| [deleted]
| advisedwang wrote:
| Amateur radio is a hobby, many folks don't keep equipment on
| 24x7. If the average system is online for a few hours a week,
| pinging every address will undercount by 40x
| techsupporter wrote:
| I think it's very interesting that this person found the AMPRnet
| largely unused. I wonder how much of that is ham projects that
| don't traverse the Internet, how much is hams not knowing they
| can receive allocations from this subnet, or how much is the
| difficulty in actually _getting_ an allocation.
|
| Just my anecdotal experience in the U.S. but about a year ago I
| tried (again, after many years) to get a /24 from AMPRnet to
| announce via BGP. After not hearing back for two months, I was
| told that my request wasn't correctly submitted and to try again.
| So I did, and never heard back. Yes, the AMPRnet people go to
| great lengths to say that this is an all-volunteer effort and
| coordinators have many other things they'd rather be doing than
| processing request for addresses, but on the other hand the ARDC
| did manage to, uh, "acquire" nine figures of money from a large
| company by selling off a shared resource with minimal notice or
| community involvement so maybe paying a couple of staffers could
| be on the roadmap?
|
| I was also wondering how this person managed to get a /24 in
| short order to do their "Easter egg," which _definitely_ isn 't a
| valid use according to ARDC's rules:
|
| > But by only using a /24 (or almost $8,000 today) and more hours
| than you should, you can write your own callsign on the IPv4 map!
| Here you can see my own callsign, SV2OIY, written on the image,
| by carefully calculating the exact IPv4 addresses that need to be
| online and then making sure that they respond to pings.
|
| And then...
|
| > The reason I analyzed the 44/8 space was due to my role as a
| member of the ARDC TAC, and my duties of managing the IPv4
| Address Space, planning for the future, and improving the
| processes under which it is being operated and allocated
|
| So as with everything in life, it's not the rules you read, it's
| who you know.
| drmpeg wrote:
| I was able to get a /29 very easily here in Silicon Valley.
| However, when you ask for a /24, your local administrator
| usually wants to hear a good story as to why you need it. And
| of course, you do need to supply an amateur radio call sign
| with your request.
|
| If you think you're being treated unfairly, you can always go
| to the top and e-mail chris@ardc.net or chris@g1fef.co.uk
| techsupporter wrote:
| I'm glad it worked out for you and that some hams are able to
| use the process. I might have just been unlucky. I believe
| Chris is the person who handled my request, since it was for
| a block to announce, but I can't remember for sure and I've
| deleted the emails long ago. I worked out another way to
| accomplish what I want to do, so I'll leave a /24 for someone
| else to potentially have.
|
| The AMPRnet system is not really, or at least doesn't seem
| very, approachable for a bunch of reasons, so it doesn't
| surprise me that hams might not be fully taking advantage.
| And even once you get a block, using it on the Internet is
| more difficult than it needs to be. ARDC went to the trouble
| of having the parent net moved under ARIN's management
| (changing it away from Legacy status, another self-own), yet
| ARDC still won't use delegations or IRR/ROA for whatever
| reason. It all just seems backwards.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I'm licensed and finally have an awesome internet connection.
| I'd be interested to try this out and see how it goes.
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