The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6 | Hacker News Reader

The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6

blog.daknob.net

127 pointsAmorymeltzer39 comments

I think it's very interesting that this person found the AMPRnet largely unused. I wonder how much of that is ham projects that don't traverse the Internet, how much is hams not knowing they can receive allocations from this subnet, or how much is the difficulty in actually getting an allocation.

Just my anecdotal experience in the U.S. but about a year ago I tried (again, after many years) to get a /24 from AMPRnet to announce via BGP. After not hearing back for two months, I was told that my request wasn't correctly submitted and to try again. So I did, and never heard back. Yes, the AMPRnet people go to great lengths to say that this is an all-volunteer effort and coordinators have many other things they'd rather be doing than processing request for addresses, but on the other hand the ARDC did manage to, uh, "acquire" nine figures of money from a large company by selling off a shared resource with minimal notice or community involvement so maybe paying a couple of staffers could be on the roadmap?

I was also wondering how this person managed to get a /24 in short order to do their "Easter egg," which definitely isn't a valid use according to ARDC's rules:

> But by only using a /24 (or almost $8,000 today) and more hours than you should, you can write your own callsign on the IPv4 map! Here you can see my own callsign, SV2OIY, written on the image, by carefully calculating the exact IPv4 addresses that need to be online and then making sure that they respond to pings.

And then...

> The reason I analyzed the 44/8 space was due to my role as a member of the ARDC TAC, and my duties of managing the IPv4 Address Space, planning for the future, and improving the processes under which it is being operated and allocated

So as with everything in life, it's not the rules you read, it's who you know.

I was able to get a /29 very easily here in Silicon Valley. However, when you ask for a /24, your local administrator usually wants to hear a good story as to why you need it. And of course, you do need to supply an amateur radio call sign with your request.

If you think you're being treated unfairly, you can always go to the top and e-mail chris@ardc.net or chris@g1fef.co.uk

I'm glad it worked out for you and that some hams are able to use the process. I might have just been unlucky. I believe Chris is the person who handled my request, since it was for a block to announce, but I can't remember for sure and I've deleted the emails long ago. I worked out another way to accomplish what I want to do, so I'll leave a /24 for someone else to potentially have.

The AMPRnet system is not really, or at least doesn't seem very, approachable for a bunch of reasons, so it doesn't surprise me that hams might not be fully taking advantage. And even once you get a block, using it on the Internet is more difficult than it needs to be. ARDC went to the trouble of having the parent net moved under ARIN's management (changing it away from Legacy status, another self-own), yet ARDC still won't use delegations or IRR/ROA for whatever reason. It all just seems backwards.

I'm licensed and finally have an awesome internet connection. I'd be interested to try this out and see how it goes.

Surely trying to ping the HAM portion of 44/8 from the Internet is an inherently flawed concept?

Part of the provisions for use (e.g. in the UK) was that only HAM traffic (not third party) can be carried over the airways. So if it was possible to ping / traceroute the 44/8 net from the Internet, the echo requests would be third party traffic.

Hence why most of the radio use has been completely separated from the Internet use of this block, essentially disconnected VRFs. Some countries may allow for minor volumes of third party traffic, and rules may have been related since I was active on packet radio.

So the reservation of the 44 net always struck me as more a case of enabling a multi-homed HAM operated machine to be connected to both the Internet and the radio nets, and picking which to connect to based upon that simple address block, but it should not be forwarding traffic between the two. One can tunnel radio traffic through the Internet, but not vice-versa.

In that case since it's not routable from the outside world it seems like it would be easier to mandate that the folk using this address space all migrate to IPv6 and give back all the v4 addresses, than it's going to be to convince everyone else to switch.

Doubling the header size by switching from ipv4 to ipv6 would be significant for systems that nearly always run at 1200 baud half-duplex or slower and have significant packet loss.

If any of your pings actually routed over the RF link from some gateway, it is quite likely that you saturated the link and effectively DOSed anyone on the frequency of that link for miles. So while it looks like they aren't on the internet, it is because you knocked them off of it (and any HAMS attempting to use that frequency for any purpose would also have been DOSed).

It makes much more sense for everyone else to move to ipv6. The normal internet is many orders of magnitude faster and more reliable so leave ipv4 for the slower/higher loss protocols.

Amateur radio is a hobby, many folks don't keep equipment on 24x7. If the average system is online for a few hours a week, pinging every address will undercount by 40x

Why does insurance company (Prudential) need whole /8 block?

It’s likely they don’t, but we’re part of that early group of companies that moved first. In the article the author mentions that /8 was the smallest amount of space that could be allocated at the time.

Apple, HP and GE (IIRC) also have/had /8’s

Need? They most likely don't need it.

They got it back in the day (prob mid-90's) because they asked for it - IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween.. Now that it's a valuable asset - they are very unlikely to just hand it back.

> IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween

This. I would always ask for a whole Class C when I needed one IP. A Class C was worthless in the 90s. Just like you could buy any dotcom domain you wanted. And mine however many Bitcoins you needed in 2010.

Yep. I have my own /24 personally, registered back in the mid 90's. I know several other individuals who have them, as well. The early Internet was a very different place.

The interesting part is: Do they know they own it? If yes, second Question: Does the IT department own it or the finance department own it under the category assets?

Of course they know they known it and track it as an asset. It is incredibly valuable.

It's not going to make any sense if you ask the question now, ask it in 1990. CIDR didn't start until '93 and when they made the request in '90 they had a reasonable case a /16 would be too small (remember, classful networking times). The WWW hadn't even been invented at CERN yet and hardly anybody was using IP still even inside the networking space, what else was going to be done with IP space if not to assign it?

As for why they still own it places like Amazon which hoover up large deaths of space like this must not have made interesting enough offers yet. GE sold 3/8 that way in 2018 for example.

Amazon also bought up half of MIT's 18/8 in 2017 for an undisclosed pile of money. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854

I was at GE when they sold 3/8. It was an absolute nightmare because we still used it internally and had no notice of the sale until after it was done.

The school district in my town of 25,000 (school enrollment ~4,300) has a /21 and a /23. They got them back in the 90s.

/21 and /23 aren't really much, you could just as easily get those assigned directly in the late 2000s (in the early to mid 2010s it would require some extra paperwork but was still doable). Remember the difference in block sizes is 2^(larger-smaller).

Neither network is very big, to be sure, but there's no earthly reason why such a small school district needs a /21 (or, really, a /23). Nobody is going to deploy an IPv4 network w/o NAT, and their self-hosting needs today are minimal. I support a geographically-adjacent school district w/ about half the enrollment. At the height of self-hosting everything we had fit comfortably in a /28. A /24, to facilitate BGP announcement, would be plenty.

(My judgement is, no doubt, clouded by the fact that, for the size of companies I work with, a /24 would be an embarrassment of riches.)

/24 is hardly an "embarassment of riches" as it's the absolute minimum size you can be assigned by a RIR (or advertise on the internet).

You can only use /28s and whatnot when you are using someone else's (usually a carrier's) addresses as part of a larger group in a single route advertisement. In such setups reviewing your DMZ logs probably requires looking at NAT logs, your entire outbound NAT pool being shared amongst all types of traffic, fun with peer ranges causing the block to get blacklisted, and similar friction as a result.

I am aware that you can't announce anything smaller than a /24. I said, "A /24, to facilitate BGP announcement, would be plenty." I also know that RIR's don't handle allocations that small.

I deal primarily with small businesses who might host a VPN to facilitate access to on-prem systems, perhaps a web server for on-prem web apps, and in the past perhaps an email server. A /24 would be an embarrassment of riches for them.

Apple, AT&T, Ford, the USPS, and Comcast all hold /8s as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

The United States Department of Defense has 14 /8 blocks.

What is the author refering to in this line?

"It also helps to shed some light into this “Network 44” that became more famous by recent events ;)"?

The sale of 44.192.0.0/10 to Amazon for $108 million.

How much would a Class A be worth these days?

i'd say about half a billion for the whole /8

Stealing IP addresses wouldn't make a good Hollywood blockbuster (unless it contained action sequences with big name stars), but it could be more lucrative than armed bank robbery.

I wonder how much IP address embezzlement goes on in big companies?

Might be the plot for a cyberpunk thriller. Not sure how that genre is doing, since one could argue that it's just real life now.

A /8 are 16777216 (2^24) addresses and IPs are sold for around 50$ each [0] so somewhere around 800 Million.

[0]: https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

Ah, so:

Class B: $3 megabucks

Class C: $13k

I know a couple of guys who own roughly a dozen class B's and live off the fees from leasing them. One of my old companies (now defunct) still holds a Class C that isn't being used and doesn't have a proper owner.

How does that price work?

When I buy I static IP I know I don’t really own it, but I get to use it and it cost about US$10. I’m sure my ISP would charge me more if they paid $50 for it.

What am I missing?

Many ISPs acquired IP addresses in the past for free. While they could sell them now on open market for $50/IP, it makes sense to hold them (as their price is expected to rise) and just use them for their customers (for fixed or monthly fee).

While technically they could rent them outside, such approach is not recommended as they would lose any control about how they are used, they can be used for spamming or hacking and can get on blacklists, which could damage their future selling price.

Presumably you're paying a monthly fee for your ISP, one which includes an IP of some sort. It doesn't cost anything for an ISP to give you a static address (which likely can be removed at their whim) rather than a dynamic address given you're likely to be needing an IP 24/7 (as you're the sort of person who knows what an IP address is)

If it costs $50 for a single IP, that would be 50 cents a month at a decent return on investment (and the value of that IP is still increasing), that is part of your monthly charge (which I suspect is far more than 50c).

Additionally, if you changed ISP you're going to lose that "investment" in your static IP, so you've basically paid $10 to lock yourself in.

Another interesting article that was posted here in October – 32 Bit Real Estate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28920269

How are these maps generated. I see a reference to Hillbert curves, but was generated with code?

Interested in using this myself.

https://github.com/hrbrmstr/ipv4-heatmap for example

Reply on news.ycombinator.com