[AusNOG] Unadvertised large IPv4 allocations in the APNIC region

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:23:18AM -0700, Leo Vegoda wrote:
> 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.

Even without that mistake, if an organisation which has a /8 and
only uses (not advertises, uses) a little of it, returning the /8
and be given back two /16s of it, would have been a good deal.

Yesterday there was a /. article on that Interop returned a /8 and
somebody commented about that HP and IBM have these huge amounts
of IP space which are unadvertised to the public internet but are
still assigned internally, "as if they ever needed that". What that
person didn't understand was that if you have a merger or aquisition,
the last thing you want it to do an IP address renumbering at one
of the parties because you have a clash in RFC1918 addresses being
used. Globally unique addresses on your internal network do make
sense.

With my former-former-employer we went through some very smooth
aquisitions and split-offs because both parties used public IP
addresses on their internal network (still advertised only /24s on
the internet side of things).

Enough rant,
Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis		Website: http://www.mavetju.org/
edwin at mavetju.org	Weblog:  http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/