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Comment by im2w1l | Hacker News Reader

I have a specific IP address I want to purchase. Is this possible?

Use `whois` to see who controls the IP address and then contact them. As others have noted, you won't be able to route a single address differently, so your best bet would be to host with the controlling entity.

For example, lets say you wanted 199.255.255.254. That's controlled by hostwinds.com, which offers VPS hosting. There doesn't seem to be anyone on that IP address. The reverse DNS lookup makes it appear that it's in their normal client space. A phone call to the right person there might get you what you want.

You couldn't just get a single IP address, you'd have to buy a routable block that contains that IP address, which while I believe technically is a /28, in practice is a /24 (256 addresses)

Can you generally advertise a /24 now? I thought the filters were rougher than that.

/24's are generally considered globally routable these days, and have been for quite some time. I suppose there are still some providers out there who filter them, but we'd both be showing our age if we speculated on those names :)

In general, /24's have been routable since the 80's.

There have been periods of time where various providers had filters (in certain ranges) to prevent routing table bloat.

And how much is a /24 then? $10 * 256 ?

I'd consider that pretty damn cheap if you consider that and IP address as a form of Intellectual Property.

Look at this list of /8 blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

If the first octet of the IP address that you want is in that list, it's probably owned by someone who isn't selling.

Many of these should be reclaimed by IANA. Why do L3, ATT and HP need two /8s. Why does DOD need ten /8s? Why do CSC, Halliburton, PSINet, eli lilly, prudential, Bell-Northern Research and dupont, Daimler, Apple, GE, MIT, Ford, Xerox, IBM, Merck and the USPO need /8s.

> Why does DOD need ten /8s?

Of that list, I can actually see the DoD needing 240M IP addresses.

Why does DOD need any publicly rout-able IP address space, other than to run a handful of brochure sites, which could easily be outsourced.

The argument against reclaiming is that is serves little point at this stage in the game. It really buys you no significant time, and really we should be doing all we can to move everyone over to IPv6.

It could buy a couple decades.

Nobody wants to buy a couple decades of carrier-grade NAT, and the addresses that could be reclaimed won't buy any significant time of anything more open than that.

The estimate I saw was that each /8 reclaimed would buy one month. There were only 128 class As total and many of them are really in use (and of course the military will never give anything up).

At apple, routable addresses are handed over to macs used by people. They use private IPs just for production infrastructure.

Likely not. If addresses are $10 each and you want one, why would they spend the time and expense to transfer just one?

Not to mention that it would be impossible to route it. (last I checked—years ago—the smallest advertisement anyone would accept was a /24, and even that seemed iffy)

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