10 ms·
MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8
- imjustapie 9y agoAn updated list of MIT's IPv4 address ownership: https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/MIT-2/nets https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/MIT-2/nets
- sbierwagen 9y agohttps://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-0-0-0-1.html https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-0-0-0-1.html So they don't have 18.0.0.0/8, but they do have 18.0.0.0/9?
- bitJericho 9y agoThat's up to 8388608 addresses lost...
- Someone 9y agoSold, probably. Looking at https://www.leadertelecom.biz/ips/transfer https://www.leadertelecom.biz/ips/transfer, that could have brought in a nice sum of money (they ask #unicode code points in dollars per 65,536 addresses)
- strictnein 9y ago> "(they ask #unicode code points in dollars per 65,536 addresses)" Could someone explain this? I feel like I'm missing something (not the 2^16 addresses, the "#unicode code points")
- JoshTriplett 9y agoThere are 1,114,112 Unicode code points (17 times 64k), and that particular site happens to charge $17/IP, so for 64k IPs they happen to charge $1,114,112. Same idea as "number of libraries of Congress" or "number of Empire State Buildings", but nerdier.
- strictnein 9y agoThanks! That was very helpful. edit: From wikipedia: "Unicode comprises 1,114,112 code points in the range 0x0 to 0x10FFFF. The Unicode code space is divided into seventeen planes (the basic multilingual plane, and 16 supplementary planes), each with 65,536 (= 216) code points." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_point
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- feld 9y agoProbably easier to just look at BGP http://bgp.he.net/AS3#_prefixes http://bgp.he.net/AS3#_prefixes
- imjustapie 9y agoAh, it looks like BGP caught up. Yesterday AS3 was still announcing 18.0.0.0/8.
- knd775 9y agoWhy'd they get of them in such odd intervals?
- imjustapie 9y agoWell, I think some of the intervals are still actively used by building networks!
- Artemis2 9y agoWasn't it purchased by Amazon? I don't have a source unfortunately, except this reddit thread: https://redd.it/668ffg https://redd.it/668ffg
- vabmit 9y agohttps://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=18.188.0.0?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&showNonArinTopLevelNet=false&ext=netref2 https://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=18.188.0.0?showDetails=tr...
- payne92 9y agoMy how things change. At one point in the late 90s, I had an entire MIT Class C subnet at my house. Now, I've got 5 static IPs from Verizon FiOS on some ancient grandfathered plan. Years ago, they "changed" the addresses, prompting me to ask, "what part of 'static' is not clear?"
- smaili 9y agoJust curious, was it a breach of contract or did they have one of those lovely small printed clauses no one ever reads :)
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoMost of them are 'reasonably' static, with (relatively generous?) provisions for notice and migration.
- payne92 9y agoI believe the contract is silent on the "static-ness" of static IPs.
- plandis 9y agoIf you can find an ISP that supports IPv6 quite a few of them (maybe all?) support prefix delegation. A /64 isn't uncommon from ISPs in Seattle.
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoFIOS doesn't support V6. At all. In 2017.
- darklajid 9y agoNo friend of mine is on ipv6. No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6. Having an ipv6 prefix is useless to me (as someone that is behind the abomination called CGNAT / 'Dual Stack Lite').
- 9y ago
- packetized 9y agoLooks like they SWIP'ed out the subnets of 18/8, transferred that object to ARIN allocation, and transferred 18.145/16 to Amazon. https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-145-0-0-1.html https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-145-0-0-1.html edit: Looks like a lot more than just 18.145/16, based on https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/AT-88-Z/nets https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/AT-88-Z/nets
- aidenn0 9y agoDoes HP still own 15/8 and 16/8? I remember visiting there once and everyone had public internet addresses.
- ghaff 9y agoIt appears so. (HPE specifically.) Hewlett-Packard had an original /8 and acquired another that was Digital Equipment's by way of Compaq. Stanford had a /8 like MIT but they sold that off [edit: or gave it back] a while back.
- eric_the_read 9y ago"public" in the sense of theoretically routable, yes, but most of them were firewalled off, so they might as well have been RFC1918 addresses for all the good it did you. The worst part about getting 16/8 from Compaq was that it wasn't contiguous address space, so you couldn't use a single netmask for both. :(
- syncsynchalt 9y agoIt was contiguous, but didn't aggregate under a single bitmask. For example if it had been 14/8 and 15/8 (instead of 15/8 and 16/8) then they would have held the world's only /7.
- apostacy 9y agoThat's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've been granted available to students and researchers. Last time I was at the MIT media lab for a conference, I was able to get an unfirewalled external ip address from their wireless network. It was amazing. I briefly streamed live audio of a talk via shoutcast, but of course, nobody uses that stuff anymore. It really makes you ponder what a cloudless internet would be like. A little over a year ago, my university gave up their generous range of IP addresses. You could plug in ethernet, and not just get an internet routable IP (albeit firewalled from incoming traffic from the internet), you would even be assigned a subdomain off of the school's .edu domain. It was great. Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers. Even though you couldn't listen on a socket for incoming traffic from the internet by default, it was unfirewalled internally. I had to briefly live in student housing, and I was able to connect to my server via the school's http proxy via corkscrew. There were so many cool uses for it. Students were encouraged to run web servers if they needed hosting. It was also much faster[1] I think CMU still provides fairly decent network services. It was an insanely useful utility provided to students, and any serious engineering school should do it. [1] http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png
- dangero 9y agoIPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in case some researcher might want to use them. Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.
- flyinghamster 9y agoI've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS. This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support. I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.
- simonster 9y agoLetter to MIT community: https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8ea4cce0 https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e... tl;dr MIT is selling off half of 18.0.0.0/8 (8 million IPs)
- ghaff 9y agoSlightly longer tl;dr IPv6 is coming and we're working on the upgrade. In the meantime we have 14 million unused IP addresses out of our 16 million allocation. So it seems pretty reasonable to sell 8 million of those off given that they're worth a lot of money and we'll never need them prior to IPv6 adoption.
- takeda 9y agoheh, so they got the 18/8 for free, refused to replace /8 with /16 like other universities did to help relieve IP shortage, but then they simply sold the 8 millions of the addresses for profit, while still hugging to remaining 8 million, even though that their student body size is only ~11,200. I guess that's good for them, but it's still a dick behavior.
- kelnos 9y agoI agree with you, but I guess you could say that those IPs have "appreciated" in value from $0 way-back-when to some considerable sum today.
- ghaff 9y agoAFAIK, Stanford was the only other university with a /8 though I may be wrong. In any case, I'm not sure what the issue is with extracting money from Amazon for something they own. There are plenty of companies that were in early on that got /8s for relative pennies. Some even have two today by way of acquisition.
- skybrian 9y agoTechnically it also helps whoever they sold it to. (One side effect of speculation is that stuff gets held in reserve until someone really needs it. :-)
- sly010 9y agoOff-topic: When broadband came to my hometown around 2003 it was build out by a local guy so I managed to ask him to provide us a static IP address. I am always amused when I visit my parents that their IP address is still the same. Off-offtopic: The cable modem broke down once. We called the guy, he picked it up 20 minutes later, soldered the broken capacitor and we had our internet back in 2 hours. It was on a Saturday. He didn't have to do any of that, he had monopoly on broadband on the entire area. Small ISPs are the best.
- fao_ 9y ago> He didn't have to do any of that, he had monopoly on broadband on the entire area. Small ISPs are the best. I'm guessing part of it is because they only preside over a small area that there's a human element to it, they must feel responsible for the internet of these people, and they're close enough to them (in the hierarchy) that that actually matters.
- d--b 9y agoFor the uninitiated, can someone give a brief explanation of what that means?
- SFJulie 9y agoThey owned ~0.39% of the internet address as a single institution. Which is a lot, given MIT is less than 100K users and world is 7Billions sharing 4billions IPv4.
- pilom 9y agoComputers on the internet are pointed to by special numbers. Usually the special numbers look like 4 numbers with '.' like 123.45.67.89 Each of those 4 numbers can be between 0 and 255 so (to be more simple) the lowest special number would be 0.0.0.0 and the highest would be 255.255.255.255. Back when the internet was still young, you would go to ARIN (the American Registry of Internet Numbers) and say "I think I need 256 special numbers" and they would give you a block of 256 of them. Something like 1.2.3.0 - 1.2.3.255. If you asked for about 65,000 special they might give you 231.45.0.0 through 231.45.255.255. MIT (the Massachusettes Institute of Technology in Boston, MA, USA) was one of the first people to ask for special numbers and so asked for over 16,000,000 of them (this was 1/256 of all of them) and so MIT was given 18.0.0.0-18.255.255.255. Now today, all of the special numbers have given to people and companies. This makes each special number extra special and large groups of special numbers very extra special. Since MIT had 16,000,000 of the special numbers all next to each other, they decided to sell half of their special numbers for a lot of money. Edit: Simple English: https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/
- ghaff 9y agoOne of your words is wrong though. Cambridge, not Boston :-) OK, we're picky about that sort of thing. I think it's also more like the special big blocks of special numbers were given away without thinking much when the internet was young.
- VLM 9y agoI'm so old that I predate CIDR and in the old days before netmasks the netmask was essentially implied by the first couple bits of an ip address so all msb zero ip addrs were class A aka /8 allocations. All MSB 00 or whatever it was were class B implying a netmask of 255.255.0.0 aka a /16 allocation. Before CIDR you couldn't route or advertise rando netmasks like a /9 or a /20. There were no steps between a /16 and a /8 so if you convinced (someone, forget who) that you "need" more than 65K ip addresses (and MIT is big enough to need more, theoretically) then you got a /8. A lot of noobs think ipv4 rolled out with CIDR; not so. For "a long time" people had to make due with classful routing. From memory, isn't RIP v1 only classful routing compatible? Been awhile since I used something that old.
- trollied 9y agoxkcd explained what a mess the allocations were ages ago: https://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/
- takeda 9y agoI guess that's just human nature, we are doing similar with IPv6 right now. The smallest allocation for IPv6 is /64 that's 1.84467440737096E19 addresses.
- syncsynchalt 9y agoOnly similar if you ignore that there are 2^64 available /64s. We're never going to be in danger of running out, so the use of /64s allows potentially interesting application of the host part of the address (uses so far include stateless autoconfiguration and privacy addresses).
- droidist2 9y ago> We're never going to be in danger of running out. Just wait until every cell in your body has its own IP.
- syncsynchalt 9y agoMy body is v6-ready.
- aaronmdjones 9y agoAn estimate for the number of cells in an adult human being is ~37.2 trillion [1]. Let's be conservative and round that up to 40, and then assume that everyone on earth is an adult, too. There are currently 7.49 billion people in the world [2]. Let's be conservative again and round that up to 8. Multiplying these numbers gives us 3.2x10^23 cells. The IPv6 Global Unicast address space (2000::/3) is 125 bits wide, for 2^125 = 4.3x10^37 combinations. This gives us 1.33x10^14 addresses per cell. Ofcourse, thinking about IPv6 in terms of number of addresses is wrong, because you should be thinking in terms of number of networks (/64). That gives us 2^(125-64) = 2.3x10^18 networks, or 0.000007 networks per cell, which is 268054250 networks per person. I think we're okay. [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trill... [2] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ EDIT: Fixed formatting.
- dpandey 9y agoReally glad to see this happen. I (MIT alum) think this was a legacy of the past that had to change - MIT was just hoarding too many IP addresses. Not blaming MIT - it was a historical artifact, but most other universities had released theirs over the years and MIT hadn't.
- jhulla 9y agoLSC
- anqh4 9y agoI wish all of those who own a /8 would release it unless they actually needed it, that + cgnat would really help with the ipv4 shortage.
- mterwill 9y agoUniversity of Michigan has a few /16s that they still lease to all devices on their network - wireless and wired.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]