[AusNOG] Unadvertised large IPv4 allocations in the APNIC region

[Leo Vegoda]

On 21 Oct 2010, at 6:49, Daniel Mills wrote:

[...]

> Surely these government departments must be sick of paying such absorbinant
> amounts, for the department im talking about, if they could potentially
> half their yearly bill to APNIC, it would be a great incentive to remove
> the single line "network 159.248.0.0 255.255.0.0" from their Cisco border
> routers...

I suspect that renumbering takes a little more effort than that edit.

> Maybe someone should prepare a database of such ranges that could be given
> back, 2x /16's = 1x /8 which is a huge amount of IPv4 space.

2x /16 used to be a /15 (if contiguous and bit-aligned). You'd need 256 contiguous, bit-aligned /16s for a /8.

> The person behind the original IPv4 nat addressing scheme didnt know that
> the Australian government and educational sectors would take it on board
> and use it as a policy for their internal lans. But he should of known
> better! :)

IP addresses were made available for IP networks. Some of those IP networks and inter-networks were and are private because they were for particular communities like the military, financial services and so on. To me, it seems quite reasonable that networks do not advertise routes to other networks that don't need to know about them. 

It is quite possible to need IP addresses for an IP network and to need unique addresses because the network will connect to other networks and RFC 1918 address clashes would break things.

Of course, returning addresses you no longer need is the right thing to do but don't imagine for a minute that it will buy significant amount of time.

Regards,

Leo Vegoda