Ask HN: How can individuals or small businesses acquire IP addresses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can individuals or small businesses acquire IP addresses?

10 pointsjamieweb15 comments

Due to IPv4 address exhaustion and the IPv6 lack of adoption, the days of owning your own IP address range seem long gone...

It's no longer feasible for individuals or small businesses to purchase their own ranges, mainly because of the high cost, barrier to entry, responsibilities, etc.

Do any solutions exist that allow you to purchase small numbers of IP addresses for your own permanent use?

I understand that due to limitations in BGP, you can't announce a single IP address to a different location than the rest of the range. However, could there be an overlay protocol or service that allows this to happen?

Renting IPs from hosting services like Linode or AWS doesn't count, as they are locked-in to the hosting provider and you don't own them directly.

Any suggestions?

View on HN

You want an IPv4 broker. Do a Google search. You can find several firms selling IP blocks. The going rate is around $20/IP, or about $5K for a /24 (class C.)

I believe you will still need to be able to justify the need for the address space to complete the transfer. "Justifying" a /24 should not be difficult.

(I've owned a /24 since the early 90's...)

Can I use this with my own isp? Bring your own ip?

Or with azure?

If you have a "business" account with your ISP, possibly. For residential, it is almost certainly "no."

Last I checked, Azure didn't let you do external BGP announcements but I may be wrong...

Thank you for saying "external bgp announcements". I can go research now.

Are you able to recommend any reputable brokers that offer IPv4 addresses for a price suitable for individuals or small businesses? I only need a few addresses ideally.

No, sorry. I got my block for free during the early years of the commercial internet. You need a /24 (256 IP block) for it to be globally routable.

If you want to "own" a few addresses to play with, it is not technically possible. If you want a small block, you should just get a VPS that supports multiple IPs and tunnel them back to your location.

Be aware that there are caveats in this approach. First, a /24 or larger range is compulsory for multi-provider BGP, which is, itself, compulsory for dynamic advertisement in the way you want. Second, broker ranges are only suitable for your use case if they are allocations rather than reassignments. Third, even when a broker has reassignable ranges, they need to then use detailed reassignment rather than simple reassignment for your new block. Otherwise, you will be unable to announce prefixes to providers requiring proof of ownership. Please refer to https://www.arin.net/resources/request/reassignments.html for detailed information on the SWIP process.

In every recent case I've seen (over the last six years), no broker has had ranges larger than /24 for reassignment. Of course, you can do with just a /24, but the justification process has also grown somewhat more stringent, as a pure traffic engineering justification ("We need BGP; here is why.") is no longer enough, in my experience.

You are quite right that IPv4 is exhausted and unobtainable. Moreover, your intuition about IPv6 is also correct, though I would argue the lack of Internet-scale protocol translation is what actually destroys the IPv6 value proposition.

The limitation you point out is not actually in BGP but is, instead, a matter of convention: ISPs will, generally, accept prefixes longer (smaller) than /24 but will not advertise them to other ISPs, in turn. This convention arose out of the need to mitigate the steady increase of core routing table size--as did CIDR, itself, and VLSM before it.

While not ideal, most organizations use DNS for failover of individual, redundant hosts from one address to another. Of course, you may find this unsuitable for your use case, but if the users of your host's service are "the Internet," then the only alternative is to mediate how those users access the host, either by inserting a proxy or creating redundant connections with a custom client on the host.

If you can provide more detail regarding your specific requirements, I may be able to elaborate further, more bespoke alternatives.

Thanks for the info.

I'm interested in having my own IPs mainly so that I can move servers wherever I want and take the IPs with me. CNAMEs can only go so far when it comes to moving things around without interruption.

It's only a small personal operation though - and I am aware that limitations with hosting providers and ISPs may prevent me from being able to point my own IPs to them.

If you're not satisfied with the low-TTL/round-robin strategy, you would need to build out some private infrastructure to perform routing failover.

A tunnel with private routers between two cloud providers would allow you to advertise private host routes (/32) inside your network while NAT-ing appropriately to the outside. This achieves manual failover (or fast migration), but it can be expanded for dynamic failover, as well.

Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate the above solution. Otherwise, good luck with whatever solution you choose.

It’s not true that IPv4 is unobtainable, you can e.g. apply to become a RIPE member & LIR to obtain a /22 subnet of addresses. The cost is in the several 1000 €’s per year if I remember correctly. You can equally well try to reach out to an existing LIR and rent addresses from them of course. Not sure if that corresponds to your definition of “owning” IP addresses but as a LIR you can theoretically hold on to the addresses indefinitely.

More info: https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/become-a-mem...

Because RIPE's last /8 is gone, any remaining addresses will come from whatever has been recovered. Under no circumstances should you expect to receive a contiguous /22 through LIR registration. Still, for obtaining routable /24s, the LIR route will likely remain viable for the next year or so.

If you are a licensed amateur radio operator, you can obtain an IP addresses through AMPRNet for packet radio type applications.

http://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Requesting_a_block

Note, this is not for permanent use. From the above link: "You also must login every 3-6 months even if it's just to check in to keep your block active, you've been warned!"

Interesting note actually, thanks. :)

Yes, you just rent them off your ISP as part of your package.

This is totally normal for an SME who might buy business FTTC or a lease-line with 5 static IPv4 addresses included. Then you would set up one for incoming mail, one for internet access, one for a site to site VPN etc. That sort of thing. What use case do you have for owning an IP address separately from your ISP?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com