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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The lack of usage in static blocks isn't entirely surprising. A lot of universities got their IP space early and utilize it poorly. I know this because it is in part my fault.

When we were assigning IP addresses for the dorms at Berkeley, we gave every dorm a /24, and then reserved the first 50 IPs for "future use" and "internal use". Most of those were never used. And unless 200 people signed up per building, some of the top end was missed too.

My understanding is that they have since fixed this on the wifi since many people bring three or four devices now, but the hard wired connections are still poorly utilized.

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My fraternity house had a housing license for up to 22 people. We had a /16. Though, my understanding is that only the first /24 is currently routed to the house, and we moved to a larger house that's licensed for 50-something residents.

Recall AllAdvantage.com, which had a pyramid-scheme style payout for installing spyware on your computer and browsing the web. Payout capped after browsing 48 hours per month with the spyware on. One of the guys trimmed down Win95 and bought a student VMWare license. A gig of RAM was about $4k at that time. He scripted everything up so that at boot time, the Win95 guest would mount an SMB share from the host, remove the first line from a shared CSV file containing fake account details, and proceed to register a fake account at AllAdvantage with him as the referrer, and randomly browse for 48 strait hours (using a local caching web proxy) like a meth head on a bender, and then shut down. Monitoring software on the host would see the shut down VM and spin up a new one with a new IP. The VM IP assignment code hopped all over the /16 to reduce suspicion. AllAdvantage went out of business before it failed to ban him. 30 VMs ran simultaneously. In a 30-day month, he had 450 VMs run, and got just under $2 in referral fees per VM. The fake accounts never made enough money to get cheques mailed to their fake addresses, so AllAdvantage didn't get returned mail or un-cached cheques, but he was still very surprised that he never got caught. He figured he had less tan 50% chance of making it 4 months and paying off his 1 GB of RAM. He wasn't really doing it for the money, but saw it more as a kind of cat-and-mouse game.

He was always doing stuff like that, enjoying being the mouse in a cat-and-mouse game, with almost none of it for money. He just got a kick out of seeing people doing silly things and demonstrating the silliness of their ideas. You can get into a fair amount of mischief with a /16, which is presumably why now they only route the first /24 to the house.

So did he make enough money to pay off the ram? You didn't specify if they went out of business before or after he got a payout.

Yes, he made a few thousand dollars net profit over 7 to 9 months.

He also had a poker bot running for a while (on sites that didn't mention bots in their ToS) and kept complete logs of cards seen and player actions. There were plenty of players who could beat his bot, but his bot would refuse to sit down at tables with players with too good records against it. With three credit cards running three accounts, that poker bot was paying his rent for the first year or two after he moved out of the fraternity house.

He told me a couple of times that he'd give me FTP access to his logs, but never got around to it. When I heard that RC4 had a bias in its key schedule, I thought a bit about how to make an unbiased shuffle, and figured that a lot of people would use a naive biased shuffle. I was curious if my friends poker hands would show such a bias. I also wanted to check against the Perl, GNU C, MS C, and Visual Basic built-in rand() implementations, checking for srand(time()) and srand(time()^getpid()). (Perl still ruled the web in those days.) Later, an academic paper came out explaining that the most common poker site software was written in Pascal, and had both flaws I wanted to look for (plus another flaw due to an off-by-one error in the author's understanding of the Pascal Random() API.) I didn't think to look at popular Pascal implementations' pseudorandom number generator implementations, so I doubt I would have found the predictable prng seeding flaw via my friend's logs, but there's a chance I would have. I'm not sure how much an edge in poker the shuffle bias flaw gives, but I imagine it's tiny.

To me (a non-expert) it feels that we have the same problem as land use. Vast unused lands are just sitting there fenced, while some other parts of the town is crazy crowded.

Of course, IP address might not have the same physical boundaries, but instead they have organizational barriers, which can be equally tricky ones, if not trickier.

The bottom line is that we suck at resource management and distribution at nearly every field.

The answer for land was property and inheritance taxes so families couldn't just sit on valuable land non-productively forever.

If it cost $1/year*address most entities with a /24 or /22 would barely notice, but HP might decide that they don't need 33.5 million IP addresses after all.

The problem is that the growth of the internet is up to now exponential. Even if we can get a few more years by spending inordinate amounts of money on reshuffling IPv4 addresses, it won't solve the underlying problem. It'll just delay the inevitable IPv6 deployment.

I've been reading about imminent address space exhaustion and the pending switch-over to IPv6 since I was proud of my five digit slashdot ID. It's easy to get cynical about it.

Oh, for sure, people have been warning about it for almost 15 years now (got my first tunnel in the early 2000's). But the difference now is that we've actually reached exhaustion, so I don't think it's fair to say nothing has changed.

That would unfortunately accelerate the cancer that is carrier grade NAT.

Growth in routing table sizes on core routers is a bigger problem.

IPV6 is massive in part so we can get back to sensibly slicing up subnets and keep routing tables small.

Except will that happen? ... :)

And then we might still be on IPv4 30 years from now.

It was the same thing when I was at University of Delaware. Each hard wire got a IPv4 public address. I lived in one of two apartment towers. From what I recall there were three /24s split between the two.

Much like your setup the first 25 were reserved. In addition anything past that was rate limited. I recall anything past that was ~10->25Mbs. Going into the lower range though got around 500Mbs. I know similar stories from other state employees. The times when IPs were more prevalent.

Same thing at SUNY Polytechnic (previously SUNYIT). Its been a few years since I left but when I was there all hardwired devices had a public IP address.

> Its been a few years since I left but when I was there all hardwired devices had a public IP address.

Which is, of course, how it's supposed to be. I used to host a website from my dorm room.

Every device on the Internet should have a public IP address!

> Every device that wants to be on the Internet should have a public IP address!

We don't need every network-connected device, with all their flaws accessible to the world. Unfortunately, IPv6 will not help us there.

That's what firewalls are for.

In a perfect world you'd get your ipv6 prefix from your ISP, and have your firewall white list specific outbound suffix addresses.

If you need topology privacy you'd shuffle your /64 every once in a while.

Doesn't IPv6 have local addresses that aren't routed externally, like ::1.

I have several clients that have a class B or class C and use it mostly for their internal address space instead of using private address space. What a waste.

It's a very good way to make sure that if those clients need to route their internal networks to each other, they don't have to renumber. If two companies using 10.x.y.z networks merge, you are likely to end up with a mess. Heck, if you need to VPN to a 10.x.y.z network and your local network is also 10.x.y.z, you'll end up with a mess.

(The IPv6 solution here is Unique Local Addresses, where fdXX:XXXX:XXXX::/48 are all permissible local networks, and if you use a decent RNG to generate the 40-bit number XXXXXXXXXX, you're unlikely to hit a collision with any other actual, active site, let alone one you might want to route to.)

Instead of using fd with a RNG, you should follow the RFC...

SixxS even runs a registry for ULA prefixes: https://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/ula/

Put in your MAC address, get back a ULA. Then register it so that in the future if someone happens to have the same mac address you don't accidentally use the ULA.

I'm following the RFC: "Locally assigned Global IDs MUST be generated with a pseudo-random algorithm consistent with [RFC 4086]. Section 3.2.2 describes a suggested algorithm."

I happen to be of the opinion that /dev/urandom is more likely to comply with RFC 4086 than the suggested algorithm, but I may have an unfairly low opinion of the distribution of timestamps and MAC addresses.

HP owns two /8 subnets. I know they use them at least partly for internal address space.

NAT is clumsy ;)

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