UK sells off unused net addresses | Hacker News Reader

UK sells off unused net addresses

bbc.co.uk

41 pointsmattvot30 comments

Oddly enough, while the DWP's class A address range is used internally, in all written communications the leading octet of such IP addresses must be redacted for "security" reasons, despite being (a) a matter of public record, and therefore (b) displayed on the xkcd map of the IPv4 address space (as "UK Social Security").

https://xkcd.com/195/

For anyone interested the block that has been sold is 51.174.0.0/15. The remainder of 51.0.0.0/8 still belongs to the Department of Work and Pensions though none of it is publically routable.

Department of Work & Pensions. Ho Ho Ho ! No-one seriously believes the DWP uses a /8. The whole UK Gov can use the block for internal purposes as it was allocated at a time before RFC1918 was a thing and everyone worked on the basis you needed to get an IPv4 allocation for your IP network. Several other public bodies in the UK got smaller blocks too (you can find them without too much digging on Google) but most of these were never externally routable either. You can bet traffic arriving from 51/8 is not about any pension.

Background: there were some pretty forward thinking people in the UK Gov at the early stages of 'the internet'; Parliament got it's own TLD when it was a case of sending an email to be allocated a TLD and various bodies got IPv4 allocations before they even had any sort of working networking going on. There are bits of the stories around if you look hard enough, but I've never seen it pulled together - I'm sure it would make interested (and probably classified) reading.

> Parliament got it's own TLD

Which is interesting and makes sense, because Parliament (legislature) isn't part of the government (executive), so it can't go under the gov.uk TLD.

I think it's a mistake to assume anything malicious or untoward took place. A /8 is quite a lot of addresses, but at one point it was assumed a) the total pool of addresses would last a very very long time and b) that every network connected device would have a publicly routable IP.

I wasn't suggesting anything malicious. [edit: OK, perhaps I should have suggested someone's name had to go on the allocation record and DWP would look most benign. My recollection is the allocation was once listed as being NHS but that may be due to one too many whiskies and/or conflating another allocation.]

I was suggesting it was a throwback to the very early days of the internet expansion when people had a much simpler understanding of how it would all work and were excited to get involved. I think there are some enlightening stories to be told from various UK governmental departments which are not normally the source of such forward thinking.

> Parliament got it's own TLD when it was a case of sending an email to be allocated a TLD

Which TLD would that be?

parliament.uk - not really a TLD though

http://www.parliament.uk/

All MP email addresses appear to be <name>@parliament.uk

That's squarely a second level domain, not top-level one.

Until last year all uk addresses were in the format of domainname.x.uk, where x mimicked the US tlds, .org.uk, .gov.uk, .co.uk (instead of .com.uk), etc.

It is publicly routable. They choose not to announce it. It's not publicly routed, but it most definitely is routable.

This is interesting in that if IP addresses are allowed to trade freely (currently 4 quid per IP), I'd argue that we'll never run out of them. And this whole transition to IPv6 may never be necessary.

We'll never run out in the sense that it will always be possible to buy one if you have enough money. Just like we haven't "run out" of, say, original Apple ][s - if you really want one, and can pay enough, you can still get them in the open market.

Doesn't mean they're available at a practical price for most endeavours though. At some point it's going to become cheaper to use IPv6 than to buy from the limited pool of IPv4 addresses. Indeed for some use cases it's already there.

IPv6 will be inherently necessary.

In the next ~20 years there will be tens of billions of things connected to the Internet, vastly exceeding the v4 limitations.

The ability to have unique addresses for trillions of objects, may enable new technologies we haven't yet thought of.

How about every house, or Sim character, in your own virtual reality universe having a v6 ip address? Silly, sure, so what.

It's technologically absurd to stick to such a limited, primitive system as IPv4, with a mere four billion addresses. It'd be identical to arguing that we don't need more bandwidth, storage, transistors, et al. because, seemingly, we already have a lot. When in fact, every time we expand such restrictions, we discover and invent vast new technology fields.

And the notion that v4 addresses should cost any meaningful sum, when we can each have a million v6 addresses for little to no cost - that makes it clear what the right direction is. Plenty should always be chosen over scarcity in computing resources.

By that logic if we had 10 IP addresses we still wouldn't run out of them if we just could trade them freely. It is pretty obvious why that does not really work.

Well, presumably if blocks of IP addresses get radically smaller, routing tables will get large enough that not every system can handle them. Given how sluggish people are about upgrading to IPv6 people obviously aren't upgrading often, so there must be a lot of legacy equipment out there.

So it's not like I can just buy an one or two IP addresses, like I could in a liquid marketplace.

If you are starting a new cloud provider and offering something like containers (say LXD), you have a big problem on your hands. IPv6 and v4 aren't really interchangeable from an end user perspective. Also, techniques are NAT64 are shocking when you look at them in detail (my jaw dropped at least ... not all protocols can be supported with NAT64, proxies need to be stateful etc.) We are in for a mess.

Weren't there already problems last year because the BGP tables got too big for some ISP equipment to handle? http://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-hiccups-today-youre-no...

Heaven forbid you use a router that was actually designed to be a router, rather than a switch with a henky supervisor card thrown into it.

Also help us if the routing manufacturers actually put more than 2GB of memory on the routing engine.

The economies of scale works backwards here: the more you break up a block of addresses, the more inconvenient it is to route to them and the less they're worth. I'm not sure how easy it is to transfer anything smaller than a /24

> trade freely (currently 4 quid per IP)

Sorry, best I can do is 2 proquo per IP.

Bad jokes aside, I think the IPv6 thing is for the prospective benefit of sundry bits of hardware hippity-hopping around, which would be price sensitive.

That was a well-written article. Someone who's not a tech expert might understand it, and wouldn't be mislead. Unusual.

Still waiting for an ipv6 address for gov.uk

Is there any way to purchase IPv4 addresses as an investor? It seems like they will be an appreciating asset over the next few years, if you are willing to make the gamble that IPv6 adoption will be on a longer timeframe, rather than a shorter timeframe

IP networks acquired via purchase are still subject to local IRR use regulations. You can't just gobble up IP space without using them nor without using what you've currently got (80% utilization).

Even if you managed to acquire them, the IRR's could claw them back (in theory).

That's not true. Leased space is very different from IPv4 space you own, specifically legacy space that pre-dates the creation of these RIRs. You can definitely buy IPv4 space and use it however you want and re-sell it, split it up, etc.

ARIN has the most ridiculous policies on IPv4 space and RIPE actually has the best, in my experience.

IPv6 is coming no matter what and a healthy IPv4 market is not going to stop that. The IPv4 market improves efficiency by re-distributing the addresses to people that actually need them.

Right now there are millions of addresses in the hands of people that don't even need a single IPv4 address and often don't even remember registering the space in the 90s (IPs that have not been publicly announced on the Internet for decades). They gave out too many addresses to the wrong people in the 90s and an open market will help distribute it to the people that have a technical need for them.

not if they are legacy and not subject to the LIRs usage agreement.

you might have to buy some really big military contractors to pull that off, though :)

I didn't think that RIPE let you sell off IP address space, given that RIPE 'owns' the actual addresses and just allocates them to members. Has the govt effectively 'sold' these addresses in the same way that my ISP has 'sold' me a static IP address on my DSL connection?

How can the buyers do anything useful with these addresses given that they'll still be tied to the original ASN through RIPE?

You definitely can. They're referred to as a "transfer," as of course you're not selling ownership.

http://v4escrow.net/v4escrow-completes-the-largest-ip-addres...

http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2014/07/21/652140/1009...

These large blocks might actually predate RIPE and thus not fall under their "jurisdiction".

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