I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.
>I hope they stopped doing that, but I doubt it.
Why should they stop? Ideally we'd have had at least 64-bit or better 128-bit from the beginning in a nicer form then IPv6 ended up and then every single one of us could have millions of IPs if we wished. That isn't how it ended up but that doesn't mean those who got them shouldn't use them. I make use of my minuscule bit of public IPv4 for my own stuff.
Because it shows how wasteful these companies operate with resources others are in need of.
There are only ~4 billion IPv4 addresses. There are more than that many humans alive, most of whom have or will have a smartphone. So we're already short on addresses without considering network equipment, servers, IoT, or anything else.
It reminds me of the nouveau urbanists that move into places like SF in droves then instantly start complaining that the little old lady down the street, who has lived in the same house for 50 years, is being greedy and wasteful because she doesn't sell her family home to developers who will build 50 shoebox condos in its place.
I suspect most of the "10/8 ought to be enough for anyone" crowd has never worked on a complex enterprise network. Just because a netblock is in use doesn't mean it has to be routable to the Internet.
The problem isn't with IBM. The problem is all the cloud BS -- the 18,000th food delivery app that no one asked for -- isn't using IPv6. And that's just pure laziness on the developers' part.
For a real-life example of that: according to documentation which can be found at its website, the Brazilian Central Bank has been allocated a full /18 for the national inter-bank network; each financial institution connected to that network receives a /27 or a /28 (or a pair of them) from that range. If you look up that address range on bgp.he.net, you'll find out that it's not announced to the public Internet at all.
And that 9/8 allocation predates RFC1918 by at least four years.
IBM is basically hoarding a bunch of addresses where there's no technical reason to. I get that they aren't required to do anything about it, but it does seem topically relevant.
NAT was developed as essentially a hack, originally more to solve tricky routing situations, but later more to allow broad use of reserved range IPs. But the original intent was always that all hosts would have a unique address, regardless of where they were or were not reachable form (or advertised to). This is a significantly better situation than the modern world of widespread use of reserved ranges and NAT, because it meant that there would not be addressing conflicts even between two private networks. Or, more practically, it meant that setting up tunneled connectivity (VPN, MPLS, whatever) between networks not advertised to the public internet always works properly, because those networks are using IP addressing as intended and thus can simply advertise their routes to each other.
Private IP ranges for "private" hosts are an adaptation to the limitations of IPv4 space, not any kind of design ideal. It's an awkward solution to a bad problem that makes numerous real-world IT situations more difficult, most commonly the case of setting up VPNs between private networks and being forced to introduce NAT because they are both using overlapping private IP space.
A very common but small example of this is the need to choose "unusual" private IP prefixes for VPN networks (like 10.106.41.0/24 or something else sort of randomly selected), because if you use something "simple" like 192.168.1.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/24 you are 100% guaranteed to run into route conflicts because of people's home and small business networks using these ranges internally. If everyone used properly allocated IPs, even on private networks, we simply wouldn't have this problem!
IPv6 offers us a bit of a reset opportunity since it was designed to have enough /64s available to allow use on private networks. Hopefully people understand this and use IPv6 the way it was intended!
Well, no. The word "Internet" is short for "Inter-network exchange".
The original idea of the internet was to allow LANs to talk to each other. Not to give every single device on Earth its own unique key.
If I asked for a class C for my business running a local corner store, I'd be looked at like I was crazy.
IBM gets 16 million public IPs and it's cool?
Yeah, I know you can't perfectly use an IP space, but with 128 offices, IBM could give each office an allocation of around a hundred thousand IP addresses (rounding down by over 20%. But even if it were 10,000 - that's still absurd.)
I worked for a couple of small and mid-sized companies that had /16's and larger. And we barely used a fraction of that space.
I have a /24, personally, registered back in 1993. It's routed to my home network. I know several other folks who were on the early internet, and had the same.
There is an important difference between "it might be necessary to put them behind NATs" and "shouldn't they be on NATs?".
In any case, /16 should be enough room to prioritize.
IPv6 would be cool.
What is bad is ipv4 doesn't have enough space for everyone. Time to move onto ipv6. I don't know how to make that happen.
If you want to pick on a company for hogging IPv4 space, pick on Apple. They have a /8 and probably aren't using any of it.
Indeed, both apple.com and icloud.com resolve to 17.253.144.10
Most (if not all) of Apple's infrastructure uses their /8 block. With Apple Park they've moved to using a 10/8 with NAT for talking to the outside. Between iCloud, iTMS/App Store, and iMessage Apple's got a non-trivial amount of global network infrastructure beyond just their corporate network.
So I guess be mad at Apple for using their IP space?
I asked for a /22 of IPv4 for my home, and was given it, 3 years ago. I also got a /32 of IPv6, and a 32bit ASN to do BGP with.
I paid the signup fees to become an LIR, paid the membership fees, and requested my /22, /32, and ASN allocations. There were no looks, crazy or otherwise. The policies are pretty transparent. Pay money, receive resources.
That said, the policies have since changed (about a year ago?)
But that does definitely seem like an excessive amount for them to own. I would guess the huge swathes the government has reserved are not exactly being used to their potential either.
Neither Apple, not IBM, actually need that many publicly useful set of IPs. IBM would be smart to sell them off. Apple is probably going to sit on them. (I used to work at IBM and that 9 block was very confusing to me, considering that IBM isn't even that big of a DC operator these days)
<citation required>
It's not equipment...it's purely a financial business decision that this hasn't happened yet.
The only real options besides 10/8 are to have been big at the advent of the internet (like IBM or Apple) or misappropriate one of those IP blocks in the hope it never becomes publicly routable.
I'm sure it's a fine option now but that RFC is pretty new.
This is a nightmare even inside companies. Two teams set up a default VPC, and one day you go to peer them and find that the IP ranges conflict. At my last job, I ended up using Netbox to manage our private IP ranges alongside our public IP ranges. (In theory, it would be nice if cloud providers offered this feature. "8 other VPCs on this account also use 10.0.0.0/8. Are you sure you want to be the 9th?")
9. addresses only started being used widely inside IBM around 1992 as the internal multi protocol network rolled out (combining RSCS over SNA and TCP/IP). As APPC connected devices gave way to TCP/IP connected devices allocations shot upward, IIRC each major campus was a /16.
Advantis/IBM Global Network ran the 9 network on the same physical and logical circuits as the public networks they managed, leading me to bypass the IBM firewall unintentionally multiple times as the filters they used broke. This may be one of the reasons RFC1918 addresses were discouraged (at least through 12/2001 when I left).
Ironically, having such addresses was sort of useful when companies got acquired and teams got shifted around. Starting to use an acquired company's network that was never designed with "what if we get acquired and have to play nice with others" in mind causes all sorts of routing pain.
MIT Student Radio WTBS 1964-65.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI2Xx3XSTFw
WTBS "The Ghetto": Soul-Music Radio Show. Created by Black MIT students in 1970, this radio program gained popularity in the Cambridge/Boston area.
https://www.blackhistory.mit.edu/story/wtbs-ghetto
Promo for MIT BSU's "The Ghetto" (WTBS 88.1 FM)
edit: Just did a quick WHOIS. They still have the /16 even though the university doesn't exist any more (merged with another). Crazy.
Even the article defined it as IP space not owned.
From the parent article "I will define IP address squatting as “using IP addresses that are not RFC1918 defined and not your unicast space issued by a RIR”."
Unless this is meant to construe all legacy assignments as "squatting" which is a pants on head definition.
Using IPs for internal networking doesn't necessarily mean under utilizing though; but might not be enough to justify such an assignment today.
But how do you define 'use' they could easily 'use' them by simply announcing them via BGP and null routing the traffic to the IP's they don't want exposed?
The end answer is still IPv6, where everyone can have as much or as little IP space as they want.
Can they make a plausible spreadsheet showing use. But, clawback of IP allocations is very rare, even for allocations that were made with agreements allowing it. There's some high profile cases relating to fraud, but otherwise nope. Legacy allocations would be nice to clean up, but if it's not voluntary, it's not happening. And at this point, if it happens, it's probably going to be a sale rather than a return.