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IPv4 address utilization is incredibly low. For example, consider 44.0.0.0/8 - it's sitting around almost entirely unallocated. UCSD Caida uses it for their net

IPv4 address utilization is incredibly low. For example, consider 44.0.0.0/8 - it's sitting around almost entirely unallocated. UCSD Caida uses it for their network telescope (pretending to use it for amateur radio) and won't give it back. Just look at how dark it is: https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png (from https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-hilbert-curve https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-hilbe...) Discussion on r/amateurradio - https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/ohi7j/did_you_know_that_there_is_a_classa_16777216/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/ohi7j/did_you...

rasz 9y ago
Not to mention DOD, its not like they will one day plug all those intranet computers to the internet.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  No, but they probably have a bunch of probes along the lines of "if you see any traffic in these ranges on the public internet, raise all the alarms," which is arguably a kind of usage in its own way.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    Can someone troll them by spoofing addresses and find out?
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      "Draco dormiens numquam titillandus."
Beltiras 9y ago
Apple has an /8 but Microsoft does not? How did that happen?
- benjohnson 9y ago
  Why would you want to be a part of the inter-net? Microsoft has all of MSN!
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  I assume this comes from NeXT who did lot's of TCP-stuff early, not sure though. Microsoft whoever came to IP world quite late and did NetBEUI or IPX before.
- toopsss 9y ago
  Microsoft pretty much had an anti internet strategic policy until 1995, that’s why. Back in the day a tcpip stack was a third party add on.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - notyourday 9y ago
    Microsoft got lots of its address space by buying Nortel assets.
  - outworlder 9y ago
    Trumpet Winsock?
    - astrodust 9y ago
      Consider that when Trumpet Winsock was a third-party IP add-on for Windows 3.1, classic MacOS already had IP support built-in. Ironically around that time Microsoft was selling Xenix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix) which did support it.
      - kalleboo 9y ago
        Originally Apple's MacTCP was actually a product they sold separately, it wasn't bundled into the OS until 1994. Although it was usually easy to get a hold of a copy since universities and such had site licenses, and ISPs often had redistribution licenses
nsbq71 9y ago
>UCSD Caida uses it for their network telescope (pretending to use it for amateur radio) and won't give it back. Why do we have to convince them to give it back? It's not like IP addresses are tangible and we have to break into their offices to steal them. Major ISPs could stop all routes with them and those addresses could be recovered and reassigned to other AS's I understand this is quite a big threshold to cross, but it feels necessary.
tialaramex 9y ago
The fact something looks "dark" on that plot doesn't tell you anything about how much of the space is allocated. The site linked by that many years old Reddit post says that in fact loads of this space is allocated, to specific people, in this case "Hams", I see alphanumeric designations which I seem to remember Hams call "handles" as well as geographic locations and some human names. Is the Amateur Radio "Ham" community disorganised? Yup. Does that magically mean they're not using this address space and so it's "unallocated"? Nope.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  I had this thought too, but do we realistically know anything about what types of devices are likely to respond to ping? What's the alternative? Try to initiate a TCP handshake to every port of every IP? How many servers are in UDP listen only mode or whitelist IPs to whats on their network?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    The alternative is to switch to IPv6. There is no requirement to offer any particular publicly reachable service on an IP address, a machine or device might be completely firewalled off from directly communicating with the public internet, and it is still perfectly acceptable for it to have a globally unique IP address, so it is ultimately pointless to try and measure "the real utilization" using packets.
- bsagdiyev 9y ago
  The allocation is for equipment within the packet radio network and, if you announce BGP, for your gateway connecting that equipment to the wider internet. I'm happy for UCSD to keep this block but I may be biased due to my participation in the network and general vicinity (~10mi) to the school itself.
- stordoff 9y ago
  > The fact something looks "dark" on that plot doesn't tell you anything about how much of the space is allocated. A lot will also depend on when the scan is done. For instance, the University of Cambridge has 131.111/16 and hands it out to student devices, so if you scan during a vacation a large portion of it will look empty.
bsagdiyev 9y ago
I'll just add that it's not pretended to use for amateur radio. I have an allocation in that range for my packet radio equipment assigned by UCSD.
Aloha 9y ago
It is very much in use - it may not all be visible to the public internet however. If you said it was underutilized, you'd be correct. But before we go after the hams, what about the absolutely massive address space held by the US DOD and related agencies? its literally 20x the size of the /8 held reserved for the ham community.
jlgaddis 9y ago
They don't have to give it back, of course. If anything, the first organization to have netblocks yanked out from under them should be the US DoD. As I mentioned a few days ago [0]: > There are also large portions of the 13 /8s (218 million IPs!) assigned to the US Department of Defense [5] that you wouldn't need to scan since there are no routes to them at all: the 11.0.0.0/8, 22.0.0.0/8, 26.0.0.0/8, 28.0.0.0/8, 29.0.0.0/8, 30.0.0.0/8, and 33.0.0.0/8 networks are, for all intents and purposes, "missing" from the public Internet. > Additionally, there are only four /24s in 21.0.0.0/8 that are reachable from the public Internet. Out of the 16,777,216 IP addresses that make up 7.0.0.0/8, only 255 are reachable (7.7.7.0/24) [6]. Just because we can't "see" them or get to them doesn't mean they aren't using them, though. Yes, it sucks that we're out of IPv4 addresses but we've known this was coming for, what, 20+ years? The quicker we all get moved over to IPv6, the quicker we can forget about it. (Disclosure: I've had a static IP from 44/8 for ~25 years and I don't wanna give it back.) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893669
- freehunter 9y ago
  Man I've worked with my fair share of quasi-governmental agencies who have a /8 or /16 to themselves and use it for their internal address space. I wonder how many addresses we'd have if we could take back unused address space.
  - ancarda 9y ago
    Why do they do that? They already have an /8 to themselves -- 10.0.0.0/8. Did they need an additional 16M IP addresses?
    - maccam94 9y ago
      There was a time before NAT, where every machine had a publicly routable IP, and things were good. Any machine could talk directly to any port on any other machine (firewall willing). Until one day, IP exhaustion attacked. Thankfully NAT doesn't exist in IPv6, because 2^128 addresses should be enough for everybody.
gsich 9y ago
At least it's more colorful then 33/8. Personally, I think the Amateur Radio guys deserve a /8.
d215 9y ago
Using ping is a really crude way of establishing the 'darkness' of a prefix. Complete prefixes just block off all ICMP incoming traffic, as do many core internet infra-structural devices (although they may pass them on, they won't answer pings directed to them).
teddyh 9y ago
As far as I understand the situation, it would be pointless to chase “unused” address ranges and try to claw them back because: 1. It would be technically very difficult, and old equipment is frequently hardcoded. 2. With the rate the allocations are going, you’d get maybe an additional few months or a couple of years out of this enormous effort. After that, all the addresses really would be allocated, and now what do you do? Considering the huge effort, technical and political, it would take to do such a thing, it is easier to just adopt IPv6.
- xhrpost 9y ago
  Yes this, we were blowing through a /8 every couple months in the past, haven't checked recently but might even be faster now. The parent argument comes up in every one of these threads.
  - sciurus 9y ago
    This article is about "blowing through" the last available /8, which due to new rules took five and a half years instead of a few months.
- mabbo 9y ago
  > old equipment is frequently hardcoded. > it is easier to just adopt IPv6 Old hardware won't work with IPv6 either. I'm not saying your wrong, just that while easier IPv6 still isn't what I'd call an easy option.
walrus01 9y ago
I see this argument posted a lot. Even if every one of the underutilized /8 or non publicly announced (US DoD) /8s was given back and allocated in small /24 to /20 chunks to small to medium sized ISPs, it would not have a greatly measurable long term impact. It would postpone the absolute need to migrate to ipv6 by maybe... 3-4 years, globally. The argument that we should expend a lot of effort (technical, legal, and otherwise) to reclaim a dozen /8s and start making them part of the global routing table has been pretty thoroughly debunked by ARIN, RIPE and APNIC. They are instead focused on getting people to use v6.
technion 9y ago
I remember working for a Church group that had an entire /22 dedicated to giving ~50 desktops a live IP address. They did not appreciate MS Blaster.

rasz 9y ago

Not to mention DOD, its not like they will one day plug all those intranet computers to the internet.

jjoonathan 9y ago
No, but they probably have a bunch of probes along the lines of "if you see any traffic in these ranges on the public internet, raise all the alarms," which is arguably a kind of usage in its own way.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Can someone troll them by spoofing addresses and find out?
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    "Draco dormiens numquam titillandus."

Beltiras 9y ago

Apple has an /8 but Microsoft does not? How did that happen?

benjohnson 9y ago
Why would you want to be a part of the inter-net? Microsoft has all of MSN!
johannes1234321 9y ago
I assume this comes from NeXT who did lot's of TCP-stuff early, not sure though. Microsoft whoever came to IP world quite late and did NetBEUI or IPX before.
toopsss 9y ago
Microsoft pretty much had an anti internet strategic policy until 1995, that’s why. Back in the day a tcpip stack was a third party add on.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- notyourday 9y ago
  Microsoft got lots of its address space by buying Nortel assets.
- outworlder 9y ago
  Trumpet Winsock?
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Consider that when Trumpet Winsock was a third-party IP add-on for Windows 3.1, classic MacOS already had IP support built-in. Ironically around that time Microsoft was selling Xenix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix) which did support it.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      Originally Apple's MacTCP was actually a product they sold separately, it wasn't bundled into the OS until 1994. Although it was usually easy to get a hold of a copy since universities and such had site licenses, and ISPs often had redistribution licenses

nsbq71 9y ago

>UCSD Caida uses it for their network telescope (pretending to use it for amateur radio) and won't give it back. Why do we have to convince them to give it back? It's not like IP addresses are tangible and we have to break into their offices to steal them. Major ISPs could stop all routes with them and those addresses could be recovered and reassigned to other AS's I understand this is quite a big threshold to cross, but it feels necessary.

tialaramex 9y ago

The fact something looks "dark" on that plot doesn't tell you anything about how much of the space is allocated. The site linked by that many years old Reddit post says that in fact loads of this space is allocated, to specific people, in this case "Hams", I see alphanumeric designations which I seem to remember Hams call "handles" as well as geographic locations and some human names. Is the Amateur Radio "Ham" community disorganised? Yup. Does that magically mean they're not using this address space and so it's "unallocated"? Nope.

3pt14159 9y ago
I had this thought too, but do we realistically know anything about what types of devices are likely to respond to ping? What's the alternative? Try to initiate a TCP handshake to every port of every IP? How many servers are in UDP listen only mode or whitelist IPs to whats on their network?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  The alternative is to switch to IPv6. There is no requirement to offer any particular publicly reachable service on an IP address, a machine or device might be completely firewalled off from directly communicating with the public internet, and it is still perfectly acceptable for it to have a globally unique IP address, so it is ultimately pointless to try and measure "the real utilization" using packets.
bsagdiyev 9y ago
The allocation is for equipment within the packet radio network and, if you announce BGP, for your gateway connecting that equipment to the wider internet. I'm happy for UCSD to keep this block but I may be biased due to my participation in the network and general vicinity (~10mi) to the school itself.
stordoff 9y ago
> The fact something looks "dark" on that plot doesn't tell you anything about how much of the space is allocated. A lot will also depend on when the scan is done. For instance, the University of Cambridge has 131.111/16 and hands it out to student devices, so if you scan during a vacation a large portion of it will look empty.

bsagdiyev 9y ago

I'll just add that it's not pretended to use for amateur radio. I have an allocation in that range for my packet radio equipment assigned by UCSD.

Aloha 9y ago

It is very much in use - it may not all be visible to the public internet however. If you said it was underutilized, you'd be correct. But before we go after the hams, what about the absolutely massive address space held by the US DOD and related agencies? its literally 20x the size of the /8 held reserved for the ham community.

jlgaddis 9y ago

They don't have to give it back, of course. If anything, the first organization to have netblocks yanked out from under them should be the US DoD. As I mentioned a few days ago [0]: > There are also large portions of the 13 /8s (218 million IPs!) assigned to the US Department of Defense [5] that you wouldn't need to scan since there are no routes to them at all: the 11.0.0.0/8, 22.0.0.0/8, 26.0.0.0/8, 28.0.0.0/8, 29.0.0.0/8, 30.0.0.0/8, and 33.0.0.0/8 networks are, for all intents and purposes, "missing" from the public Internet. > Additionally, there are only four /24s in 21.0.0.0/8 that are reachable from the public Internet. Out of the 16,777,216 IP addresses that make up 7.0.0.0/8, only 255 are reachable (7.7.7.0/24) [6]. Just because we can't "see" them or get to them doesn't mean they aren't using them, though. Yes, it sucks that we're out of IPv4 addresses but we've known this was coming for, what, 20+ years? The quicker we all get moved over to IPv6, the quicker we can forget about it. (Disclosure: I've had a static IP from 44/8 for ~25 years and I don't wanna give it back.) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893669

freehunter 9y ago
Man I've worked with my fair share of quasi-governmental agencies who have a /8 or /16 to themselves and use it for their internal address space. I wonder how many addresses we'd have if we could take back unused address space.
- ancarda 9y ago
  Why do they do that? They already have an /8 to themselves -- 10.0.0.0/8. Did they need an additional 16M IP addresses?
  - maccam94 9y ago
    There was a time before NAT, where every machine had a publicly routable IP, and things were good. Any machine could talk directly to any port on any other machine (firewall willing). Until one day, IP exhaustion attacked. Thankfully NAT doesn't exist in IPv6, because 2^128 addresses should be enough for everybody.

gsich 9y ago

At least it's more colorful then 33/8. Personally, I think the Amateur Radio guys deserve a /8.

d215 9y ago

Using ping is a really crude way of establishing the 'darkness' of a prefix. Complete prefixes just block off all ICMP incoming traffic, as do many core internet infra-structural devices (although they may pass them on, they won't answer pings directed to them).

teddyh 9y ago

As far as I understand the situation, it would be pointless to chase “unused” address ranges and try to claw them back because: 1. It would be technically very difficult, and old equipment is frequently hardcoded. 2. With the rate the allocations are going, you’d get maybe an additional few months or a couple of years out of this enormous effort. After that, all the addresses really would be allocated, and now what do you do? Considering the huge effort, technical and political, it would take to do such a thing, it is easier to just adopt IPv6.

xhrpost 9y ago
Yes this, we were blowing through a /8 every couple months in the past, haven't checked recently but might even be faster now. The parent argument comes up in every one of these threads.
- sciurus 9y ago
  This article is about "blowing through" the last available /8, which due to new rules took five and a half years instead of a few months.
mabbo 9y ago
> old equipment is frequently hardcoded. > it is easier to just adopt IPv6 Old hardware won't work with IPv6 either. I'm not saying your wrong, just that while easier IPv6 still isn't what I'd call an easy option.

walrus01 9y ago

I see this argument posted a lot. Even if every one of the underutilized /8 or non publicly announced (US DoD) /8s was given back and allocated in small /24 to /20 chunks to small to medium sized ISPs, it would not have a greatly measurable long term impact. It would postpone the absolute need to migrate to ipv6 by maybe... 3-4 years, globally. The argument that we should expend a lot of effort (technical, legal, and otherwise) to reclaim a dozen /8s and start making them part of the global routing table has been pretty thoroughly debunked by ARIN, RIPE and APNIC. They are instead focused on getting people to use v6.

technion 9y ago

I remember working for a Church group that had an entire /22 dedicated to giving ~50 desktops a live IP address. They did not appreciate MS Blaster.