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

Wed Sep 19 04:21:27 UTC 2012

On Wednesday, September 19, 2012, Mike Hale 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?
>
>
Er, just because it isn't announced in the global routing tables doesn't
mean it isn't used.

I work for a company that has one of those early allocation /8s.  It is
densely packed with hosts of one kind or the other - but you can't reach
(and there is no business need for anybody at all to reach) them except at
an office location or having vpn'd in to the company intranet.

I rather suspect that this is the case with most such early class A / B / C
allocations that aren't currently routed .. if the corporation isn't
defunct you can safely assume that especially the /8s are heavily used.

It makes all kinds of sense to seek out and reclaim allocations from
defunct corporations because if the individual RIRs don't, then various
spammers and botmasters will, as we've seen time and again in the past few
years.

--srs

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)