UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses 399
hypnosec writes "The Department of Work and Pensions in the UK has a /8 block of IPv4 addresses that is unused. An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region. John Graham-Cumming, the person who first discovered the unused block, discovered that these 16.9 million IP addresses were unused after checking in the ASN database."
Let's reserve our favorite numbers now! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll take:
I'm sure there's an algorithm or list that could tell me all of the possible "desirable" IPs in the /8, but, due to the fact that we shouldn't be greedy, and the completely arbitrary relation to the number 4 for IPv4, and the fact that it's an election year here in the US, I propose that we Slashdotters limit ourselves to four a piece, and leave the remainder to Reddit and 4chan. Or something.
Re:Who cares (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you'll find that this complaint comes mainly from folks that do know how to set up DNS.
The real difference isn't realizing that we have DNS, it's that with IPv6 and no more NAT, devices will do DNS and it won't be such an annoyance.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let's reserve our favorite numbers now! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://0x33333333 [Enter]
You sneaky bastard :D
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
mysql> select count(host) from systems;
| count(host) |
498 |
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
(stupid slashdot thinks mysql's output are junk characters)
Since most of those 498 servers I manage are behind NAT and have dynamic public IPs, I do have a system to track them (not ddns, but a homemade solution), and I have scripts in place that allow me to get any server's IP. Combine that with shell expansion and I can ssh root@`gethost customer_id server_id` and similar stuff. That doesn't mean you don't have to deal with IP addresses anyway, and it doesn't mean doing ifconfig eth0 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 is gonna be easy. Imagine debugging a routing table! Imagine reading the output of tcpdump with such meaningless addresses. IPv6 is gonna be a PITA.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
Ranges were given out like candy to anyone who asked in the early days of the web. Corporations, Government and Academics made a land grab because they were the only people who could use the resource at the time.
I've heard that Glasgow Uni has a /8 that's never had more than 10 addresses exposed to the Internet.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing that makes this slightly newsworthy is this about a cash strapped sovereign government sitting on a sizable pool of "spare" IPv4 space that has suddenly become a much more valuable commodity following the recent announcement that RIPE is now down to its final
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Like RFC 1751 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1751) for instance :)
Although it does tend to come up with sequences that have some comedy smutty parts.
Re:And have they got DNSUpdate in IPv6? (Score:4, Interesting)
Use radvd instead of DHCP6. That way IP addresses are predictable and unique, as long as you use /64 subnets which is standard practice with IPv6.
You can take a machine's MAC address and predict its IPv6 suffix perfectly. Add it to your /64's prefix and you know your IP. radvd and your clients will figure the same IP out on their own.