Whoa; the 3 network?

Wed Dec 24 04:09:34 UTC 1997

Gotta deal with it in a historical perspective as well. GE has had IP space 
almost since the epoch. Much of their network dates from well before well 
understood subnetting. Heck some of it dates back to the time of the IMP. 
(Think about every network you've ever inherited...None of them were ever 
'right' were they? Now picture one 20+ years in the evolutionary making.) 
No reason it could not be further optimized, but renumbering hundreds of 
thousands of machines is not a trivial exercise. And we are talking about > 
10^6 machines. Research & Development, a site I formerly worked at, was 
well over 2K machines alone. 1000 sites with 100 machines is not 
unimaginable.

Toss in subnetting and the fact that, as I recall, there is little central 
administration of the space, and it becomes a non-trivial issue to 
re-address it all. GE certainly isn't the only /8 holder out there, nor are 
they the only one with this kind of problem. I think there are a lot more 
wasted /16's out there than we may realize, particularly with corporate 
consolidation being what it is. I can think of several folks with 3 or more 
/16's resulting from corporate consolidation, all of which could be 
consolidated into one, but the pain of doing so is high compared to the 
pain of hiding or refusing to deal with the problem. You gonna move folks 
with a carrot or a stick?

But it's probably time to remove this thread from NANOG.

Bob

----------
From: 	Cameo Davine[SMTP:cameo at netsys.com]
Sent: 	Tuesday, December 23, 1997 10:08 AM
To: 	Bono, Vinny (CAP, ITS, US)
Cc: 	nanog at merit.edu
Subject: 	RE: Whoa; the 3 network?

All acquired companies.  Does that include the /18 of MAI Network
Services since that was acquired by GE as well?

On Tue, 23 Dec 1997, Bono, Vinny (CAP, ITS, US) wrote:

|
|Well, GE is the largest corporation in the world.  The total employees
|in all seven divisions and their components is just over 1.7 million.
|That is a lot.  Add in all the IP devices in NBC's network alone and
|you've got a huge number of justifiable space right there.  Further,
|they, uh sorry, we, :-)  are renumbering all acquired companies into the
|3.0.0.0/8 range and returning the historic class B's (i.e. Ameridata,
|Bodan, etc.).
|
|Vincent J. Bono
|Comstor Corporation
|A GE Capital Service Company

-
      P.800.311.4219*C.703.867.4357                 cameo.d.wood