The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

Alex Harrowell a.harrowell at gmail.com
Wed Sep 19 08:46:28 UTC 2012


On 19/09/12 08:04, goemon at anime.net wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2012, Mark Andrews wrote:
>> In message <Pine.LNX.4.64.1209182339200.5518 at sasami.anime.net>, 
>> goemon at anime.ne
>> t writes:
>>> On Tue, 18 Sep 2012, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>>> On Sep 18, 2012, at 21:11 , Mike Hale <eyeronic.design at gmail.com> 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> "this is the arin vigilante cultural view of the world.  luckily, the
>>>>> disease does not propagate sufficiently to cross oceans."
>>>>>
>>>>> I'd love to hear the reasoning for this.  Why would it be bad policy
>>>>> to force companies to use the resources they are assigned or give 
>>>>> them
>>>>> back to the general pool?
>>>> Many of them _ARE_ using them, just not using them directly on the 
>>>> public
>>>> internet. There is nothing wrong with that.
>>>>
>>>> As others have said... !announced != !used.
>>>
>>> Is they are not using them directly on the public internet, then 
>>> there's
>>> no reason we can't use them.
>>>
>>> Problem solved!
>>     !announced whole world != !announced.
>>
>>     There is a simple rule.
>
> i guess my sarcasm was missed.
>
>>     DO NOT USE ADDRESSES THAT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN ALLOCATED.
>>
>>     Anything else has the potential to cause operational problems.
>
> Tell that to the providers who keep routing hijacked blocks for 
> spammers :)
>
> -Dan

On the other hand, the scarcity is of *globally unique routable* 
addresses. You can make a case that private use of (non-RFC1918) IPv4 
resources is wasteful in itself at the moment. To be provocative, what 
on earth is their excuse for not using IPv6 internally? By definition, 
an internal network that isn't announced to the public Internet doesn't 
have to worry about happy eyeballs, broken carrier NAT, and the like 
because it doesn't have to be connected to them if it doesn't want to 
be. A lot of the transition issues are much less problematic if you're 
not on the public Internet.

Perhaps the military have a lot of weird equipment that is IPv4 only - 
in fact it's a racing certainty - but DWP is a gigantic enterprise data 
processing organisation. They also have some big Web sites, but 
obviously those aren't on the private network. (If they had enough 
workstations to need the whole /8, we wouldn't need DWP as the 
unemployment problem would have been definitively solved:-))




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