Todd Underwood was a little late

Michael Dillon wavetossed at googlemail.com
Sat Jun 19 16:39:07 UTC 2010


" "Registered but unrouted" would include space that is in use in large
> private networks that aren't visible from your standard sources for
> route views, such as U.S. DoD (6, 11, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30 /8) or U.K.
> MoD (25/8).

Have you verified each of these address ranges or are you just a mindless
robot repeating urban legends?

By your definition, there is an awful lot more "registered but unrouted" space
and researchers have been reporting on this for 10 years or more. In order
to correctly identify what you think you are talking about, you need to take
into account the date a range was registered and the date that you scanned
the data. If the difference between the two dates is less than some small
number, say one year, then it is probably routed space which has not yet
been routed but soon will be. Different people will want to set that breakpoint
at different timescales for obvious reasons.

I encourage someone to do the work to list all such ranges along with the
dates, and supply them as a feed, like Cymru does. Best would be to allow
the feed recipient to filter based on age of block.

> I've heard that some organizations are growing beyond rfc1918 space

Many organizations have grown beyond RFC 1918 space. The first ones that
made it known publicly were cable companies about 15 years ago.

And lets not forget that RFC 1597 and 1918 were relatively recent inventions.
Before that, many organizations did "adopt" large chunks of class A space.
One that I know of used everything from 1/8 to 8/8 and there were multiple
disjoint instances of 1/8 in their many global networks. People have been
building global networks with X.25 and frame relay transport layers for
a lot longer than many realize. And the Internet did not become larger
than these private networks until sometime in 1999 or so.

> and starting to use addresses like these already (for devices not capable
> of IPv6) for internal networking (not publically routed).  I believe this
> is generally considered bad citizenship, but I'm interested in why?

Stupidity. Many people have no historical perspective and think that the
only users of I{P address space that matter are ISPs. I don't consider it
bad citizenship if the "adopted" space is not routed publicly, and even
the definition of "publicly" is hard to pin down. If someone wants to route
such space to a 100 or so ASNs in Russia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan,
Afghanistan and China, then I don't think that they are blatantly being
bad Internet citizens. Particularly if they carefully chose whose addresses
to "adopt".

> Is there a range most people camp on?

No. And it would be dumb to do that. Smarter is to use some range
that nobody else is known to be camping on except the registrant
and their network is geographically distant from yours.

--Michael Dillon

P.S. At this point, the IPv6 transition has failed, unlike the Y2K
transition, and
some level of crisis is unavoidable. In desperate times, people take desparate
measures, and "adopting" IP address ranges that are not used by others in
your locality seems a reasonable thing to do when economic survival is at
stake.

P.P.S. I saw a report that someone, somewhere, had analysed some data
which indicates that IP address allocation rates are increasing and there is
a real possibility that we will runout by the end of this year, 2010.
Does anyone
know where I can find the actual analysis that led to this report?




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