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Comment by john2010 | Hacker News Reader

john2010

I know few universities that still use static ipv4 for computer pools. The admins claim easy for us to monitor for misuse.

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My company owns a /16 and everybody gets an static address for each device, so I currently "own" two global IPv4 addresses. But everything is firewalled to hell and we need to connect through a proxy, so what's the point?

I own a /24, personally. It was registered in the early 90’s. I have it routed to my home network.

Out of curiosity, how much does it cost for you to run this? Not that I'm willing to pay $10k for my own /24, but I find this super interesting.

I just installed a new FTTH ISP at home and learned the hard way what CG-NAT is, after years of having my own public IP with my previous ISP.

The /24 itself doesn’t cost me anything. I registered it before ARIN existed and it’s considered a “legacy” block. No fees cause I never signed their registration agreement.

I pay about $180/month for a “business internet” cable line. 300 megabits down, 25 up. I also “know a guy” at the ISP who made sure the routing wasn’t going to be an issue.

Yep, I was wondering more about the ongoing costs of "operating" the block. I was reading a superuser.com question [1] about it and it mentions ongoing costs, like transit, BGP routing etc.

This is super interesting! I didn't know this was even possible before I started looking into it.

[1]https://superuser.com/questions/323801/how-can-i-own-an-ip-a...

When I read that right, all the transit and routing seems to be done by his ISP. The superuser response is about what happens when your provider (or in this case, ISP) does not do this.

There are no direct costs there. I pay for the bandwidth. The ISP announces the /24 using their BGP ASN.

There are also cloud providers, like Vultr, that will allow you to do BGP with them. You could then get a network block routed to a VPS, then tunnel it out or whatever.

This is correct use of IP space.

With a routeable IP on every computer, no one would be a second class (consume-only) user of the Internet.

No corporate IT would have firewall setup to allow every computer to be routable from the internet.

So practically a globally addressable IP or not makes no impact on ability to be routable publicly

In the 90’s, this set up (public IP everywhere) was very common. I remember working in a couple offices with no firewalls.

90s were a different time for the internet, even till right after dot com bubble being online was relatively safe, many companies would not even have had dedicated InfoSec teams, no audits and compliance processes were covering firewalls etc

I maybe biased, I grew up in the 90's so I dont' really know how it was before, I do hear people reminisce about days before eternal September and bb groups and the good old 80's so perhaps it is always been a downward gradient as more and more people came online.

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