"Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers

Thu Feb 10 04:17:33 UTC 2011

David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> writes:

> I'm curious: when HP acquired the assets of Compaq (or when Compaq
> acquired the assets of Digital), is it your position that HP (or Compaq)
> "met the same criteria as if they were requesting an IP address directly
> from the IR." for 16.0.0.0/8?

since i was the guy to do the initial carving on 16.0.0.0/8 i pondered this
at the time of the CPQ and HP acquisitions.  my research revealed that the
network that DEC had numbered using 16.0.0.0/8 was still in existence and
had been part of the acquisition process.  there's an interesting question
as to whether the acquirer should have had to renumber, since the acquirer
had their own /8 and probably had the ability to contain both the old and
new networks in the same /8.  there's another interesting question as to
whether either DEC or HP could have qualified for a /8 under current rules,
since the basis for these (pre-RIR) allocations was that they needed more
than a /16 and these were the days before CIDR.  (at the time i received
the /8 allocation at DEC, we had a half dozen /16's several dozen /24's that
we wanted to stop using because we worried about the size of the global
routing table... what whacky kids we all were.  hint: i had hair back then.)
-- 
Paul Vixie
KI6YSY