Newham Council plans to sell 64k block of unused IPv4 Addresses | Hacker News Reader

Newham Council plans to sell 64k block of unused IPv4 Addresses

newham.gov.uk

4 pointsdipdapdop5 comments

Newham Council are the registered owners of a block of IPV4 addresses administered by RIPE, the regional internet registry responsible for the European region. The addresses were allocated to the Council at no cost when the IPV4 range was being initially established. The council are considering the sale to plug a hole in their books. It will provide additional finance for Adult Social Care and Children’s Services in the London Borough.

Why did they have that many anyway? Consultants?

They were allocated in a period when allocations were basically either 256 or 64k addresses. If you planned to operate a network with a few sites, maybe you had five offices and might get more, then you got 64k addresses. The time for really large allocations (like MIT's sixteen million) was over, but classless allocations (like a 1024-address /22) hadn't arrived yet.

there's no way a council this size needed 256 to begin with

Once upon a time, there were just three widely supported netmasks, namely /8, /16 and /24. The generalised netmasks were introduced and debugged because IP address pressure became serious. Before classless networking was generally available, there was still plenty of addresses for us early adopters and there was only spotty software support for netmasks other than /24.

Newham has ten libraries now. During that time, a council that had then libraries and wanted to have have a common loan database would typically use ten almost empty /24s.

I know someone who operated a school system at the time. Many schools had only two IP addresses allocated, namely .1 for the router and .10 for the local server. Each school had a /24, though, because that's what worked without bugs on the software at the time.

Other working configurations did exist. The university where I studied used a lot of proxy ARP. Which was possible, although I heard it caused a fair amount of cross-city traffic. If I had to pay for WAN traffic back then, I might well prefer to use more IP addresses and less WAN traffic.

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