Hacker News Reader

Comment by Marqin | Hacker News Reader

Why does insurance company (Prudential) need whole /8 block?

It's not going to make any sense if you ask the question now, ask it in 1990. CIDR didn't start until '93 and when they made the request in '90 they had a reasonable case a /16 would be too small (remember, classful networking times). The WWW hadn't even been invented at CERN yet and hardly anybody was using IP still even inside the networking space, what else was going to be done with IP space if not to assign it?

As for why they still own it places like Amazon which hoover up large deaths of space like this must not have made interesting enough offers yet. GE sold 3/8 that way in 2018 for example.

Amazon also bought up half of MIT's 18/8 in 2017 for an undisclosed pile of money. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854

I was at GE when they sold 3/8. It was an absolute nightmare because we still used it internally and had no notice of the sale until after it was done.

Need? They most likely don't need it.

They got it back in the day (prob mid-90's) because they asked for it - IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween.. Now that it's a valuable asset - they are very unlikely to just hand it back.

> IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween

This. I would always ask for a whole Class C when I needed one IP. A Class C was worthless in the 90s. Just like you could buy any dotcom domain you wanted. And mine however many Bitcoins you needed in 2010.

Yep. I have my own /24 personally, registered back in the mid 90's. I know several other individuals who have them, as well. The early Internet was a very different place.

The interesting part is: Do they know they own it? If yes, second Question: Does the IT department own it or the finance department own it under the category assets?

Of course they know they known it and track it as an asset. It is incredibly valuable.

Apple, AT&T, Ford, the USPS, and Comcast all hold /8s as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

The United States Department of Defense has 14 /8 blocks.

The school district in my town of 25,000 (school enrollment ~4,300) has a /21 and a /23. They got them back in the 90s.

/21 and /23 aren't really much, you could just as easily get those assigned directly in the late 2000s (in the early to mid 2010s it would require some extra paperwork but was still doable). Remember the difference in block sizes is 2^(larger-smaller).

Neither network is very big, to be sure, but there's no earthly reason why such a small school district needs a /21 (or, really, a /23). Nobody is going to deploy an IPv4 network w/o NAT, and their self-hosting needs today are minimal. I support a geographically-adjacent school district w/ about half the enrollment. At the height of self-hosting everything we had fit comfortably in a /28. A /24, to facilitate BGP announcement, would be plenty.

(My judgement is, no doubt, clouded by the fact that, for the size of companies I work with, a /24 would be an embarrassment of riches.)

/24 is hardly an "embarassment of riches" as it's the absolute minimum size you can be assigned by a RIR (or advertise on the internet).

You can only use /28s and whatnot when you are using someone else's (usually a carrier's) addresses as part of a larger group in a single route advertisement. In such setups reviewing your DMZ logs probably requires looking at NAT logs, your entire outbound NAT pool being shared amongst all types of traffic, fun with peer ranges causing the block to get blacklisted, and similar friction as a result.

I am aware that you can't announce anything smaller than a /24. I said, "A /24, to facilitate BGP announcement, would be plenty." I also know that RIR's don't handle allocations that small.

I deal primarily with small businesses who might host a VPN to facilitate access to on-prem systems, perhaps a web server for on-prem web apps, and in the past perhaps an email server. A /24 would be an embarrassment of riches for them.

It’s likely they don’t, but we’re part of that early group of companies that moved first. In the article the author mentions that /8 was the smallest amount of space that could be allocated at the time.

Apple, HP and GE (IIRC) also have/had /8’s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com