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Comment by billh | Hacker News Reader

>These days, less than one third of the address space is assigned and in use. Large chunks of it have almost never been used

This part probably angers me the most as I (and I'm sure many others) have asked for an allocation in this address space and after waiting months without reply was eventually denied the request.

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I’m not usually a “let the market decide” person, but ARIN has only made this problem worse with their idealism over reality policies. Their response has continued to be “time to switch to ipv6” which grossly oversimplifies the reality of the issue.

Oddly enough, the Europeans, through RIPE are doing it right by allowing a market system so that unused but assigned net blocks can be sold to people that actually have a need for them.

I’ve also faced denials from ARIN for tiny allocations, with a clearly justified use case. They are a miserable bureaucracy to deal with. But as others have indicated, there is still a lot of IPv4 that is allocated to organizations but completely unused.

I believe the op is not talking about a denial by ARIN. The 44 space is administered by a series of volunteers that I believe is distributed worldwide. Some people in the amateur radio community like to create little fiefdoms and the distribution of subnets in 44 is not immune to this type of gate keeping.

Ah whoops, sorry about that. Thought they were referencing the larger IP space issue. My point still stands, ARIN is terrible :)

Correct. ARDC (managing entity of AMPRNet) then used the lack of use of the 44 address space as an excuse to sell it off to the highest bidder. Those addresses were indeed unused, but not for lack of want.

There are still blocks for sale in the US and probably always will be. Not saying your wrong just that the reality is more of a gray market vs the official ARIN party line. There are blocks that were assigned predating ARIN and if you never agreed then you can still sell these at a market rate.

Its a bit of a compromise from ARIN, because in order to sell it and be recognized by ARIN (able to update whois, get RKPI records, etc) the sellers must give ARIN authority over the sold netblock space.

I personally own a /24 block predating ARIN, registered back in 1993. I am not planning on selling it, and never signed their RSA agreements and probably never will as long as reverse DNS remains delegated.

Yep, I looked into that but you basically cede all control back to ARIN. ARIN does not let you consider them “assets” so they get involved in any company acquisition. IPv4 space from other regions is much more flexible.

It’s frustrating that they paint the unused space as evidence of of abandonment, but the reality is that it’s been impossible to use any of this address space!

I didn't even know about it until yesterday! It's kept quiet and secret I guess. As a ham for 10 years now, I totally would've used this for projects if I could've got allocated space. I believe http://hamwan.org/ is on 44.0.0.0.

Hanlon's razor says to give this organization the benefit of a doubt, but to see this space go up for sale makes me sad.

Well it’s not too late, they only sold a /10 of the /8

As someone who does not know any more about ham radio than can be inferred from "Contact" and "Stranger Things", I'm curious to know what kind of projects you would have used it for.

There are a lot of digital interconnect systems operating on HAM bands. Personally for me I've been part of the ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) network for a while.

A lot of that volunteer work is getting communication up and running to people in places that have been hit by natural disasters. Normally this involves HAM with mobile rigs driving into the affected areas and acting as a hub to get messages out.

Currently this is a voice service "Hey WXXX, I've got a message for the Adam Smith at phone number 555-555-1234. Jane and her family made out of the flood and are unharmed. They're going to try and find a ride to your home in the next couple of days." This is very error prone and would likely benefit from having a reliable digital service available.

It would be valuable at least IMHO to have repeaters that operate as part of the ARES network be vetted and given a tunnel to a public address like this. It's not much but having a recognized digital presence that could be used as an identifier not only for contacting loved ones in distress but also by organizations such as FEMA to distinguish random emails from volunteers on the ground trying to get specific assistance might be useful.

This was kinda just my first wish list item when I thought of how I could use some public space so maybe there are better ideas out there.

I didn't ham radio (beyond building a regenerative receptor), but my father was very active on 80's. Him and a few others, build a computer network using ham transceptors and something called "digipiper". I remember saying that had a small BBS on it, running on a 286.

Well, I've known of it for 30 years. Since starting with AX.25 to a TNC, then playing with KA9Q NOS. So it isn't really a secret.

As I understand it, the range was supposed to only be used for Ham to Ham comms, so if routed (generally tunneled) over the Internet, was only supposed to be to other Hams.

Certainly there are people with ACLs expecting that 44.0.0.0/8 will never be sent to the Internet, nor received from the Internet. So it has in effect been a bit like a shared RFC1918 space, but for Hams alone.

Moreover those in the know probably have it in their Bogon filers, I certainly do. So it may not yet be as usable as Amazon hope.

People considering it a bogon are simply wrong. 44.0.0.0/8 has been routed on the internet for decades. If you register a subnet, you can even announce it with BGP just like any other. Also note that ampr.org (not www.ampr.org) resolves to a 44 IP.

Why not just use IPv6?

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