Re: The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

[david peahi <davidpeahi () gmail com>]

 Those who argue that IPv4 addresses must be reclaimed seem to have
forgotten that even for small organizations, converting IPv4 address space
to RFC1918 addresses, or IPv6, is a huge task given the fixed IP addresses
of many devices (printers, copy machines, etc.), and even worse, the many
key business application programs that use hard-coded IP addresses instead
of DNS resolution. Many of these application programs were written many
years ago, and are poorly supported, such that making code changes places a
company's business success on the line. Of course, unused /8 prefixes
appear to be an abuse, but as some have noted in this thread, many large
organizations were assigned /8s decades ago, and have used them for IP
addressing for key business functions.

David

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen () leitl org> wrote:

> http://paritynews.com/network/item/325-department-of-work-and-pensions-uk-in-possession-of-169-million-unused-ipv4-addresses
>
> Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused
> IPv4
> Addresses
>
> Written by  Ravi Mandalia
>
> Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused
> IPv4
> Addresses
>
> The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire block of '/8' IPv4
> addresses that is unused and an e-petition has been filed in this regards
> asking the DWP to sell it off thus easing off the RIPE IPv4 address space
> scarcity a little.
>
> John Graham-Cumming, who found this unused block, wrote in a blog post that
> the DWP was in possession of 51.0.0.0/8 IPv4 addresses. According to
> Cumming,
> these 16.9 million IP addresses are unused at the moment and he derived
> this
> conclusion by doing a check in the ASN database. “A check of the ASN
> database
> will show that there are no networks for that block of addresses,” he
> wrote.
>
> An e-petition has been filed in this regards. “It has recently come to
> light
> that the Department for Work and Pensions has its own allocated block of
> 16,777,216 addresses (commonly referred to as a /8), covering 51.0.0.0 to
> 51.255.255.255”, reads the petition.
>
> The UK government, if it sells off this /8 block, could end up getting £1
> billion mark. “£1 billion of low-effort extra cash would be a very nice
> thing
> to throw at our deficit,” read the petition.
>
> Cumming ends his post with the remark, “So, Mr. Cameron, I'll accept a 10%
> finder's fee if you dispose of this asset :-)”.