
MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8 - imjustapie
https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-0-0-0-0.html
======
apostacy
That's too bad. I think universities should make these resources that they've
been granted available to students and researchers.

Last time I was at the MIT media lab for a conference, I was able to get an
unfirewalled external ip address from their wireless network. It was amazing.
I briefly streamed live audio of a talk via shoutcast, but of course, nobody
uses that stuff anymore. It really makes you ponder what a cloudless internet
would be like.

A little over a year ago, my university gave up their generous range of IP
addresses. You could plug in ethernet, and not just get an internet routable
IP (albeit firewalled from incoming traffic from the internet), you would even
be assigned a subdomain off of the school's .edu domain. It was great.
Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran
servers. Even though you couldn't listen on a socket for incoming traffic from
the internet by default, it was unfirewalled internally. I had to briefly live
in student housing, and I was able to connect to my server via the school's
http proxy via corkscrew. There were so many cool uses for it. Students were
encouraged to run web servers if they needed hosting. It was also much
faster[1]

I think CMU still provides fairly decent network services.

It was an insanely useful utility provided to students, and any serious
engineering school should do it.

[1]
[http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png](http://www.speedtest.net/result/4339921583.png)

~~~
dangero
IPV6 solves this, plus even without you don't need anything close to this
amount of IPs to do what you're describing. It's a fairly niche case to need
that many public IPs and it seems a little crazy to hold that many just in
case some researcher might want to use them.

Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as
you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT
since most people are behind one these days.

~~~
flyinghamster
I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast
doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my
router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS.

This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one
of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support.

I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel
from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space
from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.

~~~
ajross
Actually, Comcast supports DHCP prefix delegation (I'm led to believe
everywhere, but it works at my home anyway), which is pretty much the Right
Thing in this space. Your default DHCPv6 request is from a single client and
it returns a single IP, as expected. And you can then do NAT across that if
you want, which is what their default routers do.

But if you want a subnet, you can make a second DHCPv6 request with prefix
delegation metadata, and the server will establish a route for a full /64
subnet to your existing IP and return it to you. Then you can hand these out
however you want (though they won't give you bigger than a /64 so you can do
internal subnet routing).

The only annoyance is that none of the existing Linux distros support this yet
as part of their network client integration, so you have to script it yourself
around dhclient (see the -P argument), which is a little hairy if you want to
get the hooks right (I punted and just did it once manually and left dhclient
running).

~~~
sethj
Linux doesn't support it? My Comcast router has a /64 given to it by Comcast
and all my linux boxes connected to it work like a charm.. although I haven't
been able to get my dd-wrt router to pass them on yet.

~~~
ajross
Linux supports it just fine, you have to do the integration on your own. If
you want to use the distro-provided DHCP setup, you need to work out the
NetworkManager hooks on your own to add the PD client at the right spots.

------
payne92
My how things change. At one point in the late 90s, I had an entire MIT Class
C subnet at my house.

Now, I've got 5 static IPs from Verizon FiOS on some ancient grandfathered
plan. Years ago, they "changed" the addresses, prompting me to ask, "what part
of 'static' is not clear?"

~~~
plandis
If you can find an ISP that supports IPv6 quite a few of them (maybe all?)
support prefix delegation. A /64 isn't uncommon from ISPs in Seattle.

~~~
darklajid
No friend of mine is on ipv6. No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6.

Having an ipv6 prefix is useless to me (as someone that is behind the
abomination called CGNAT / 'Dual Stack Lite').

~~~
wolrah
> No mobile phone I've seen supports ipv6.

T-Mobile LTE has been exclusively IPv6 on most phones for some time now. I'm
pretty sure other mobile providers have done the same or are in the process of
doing so.

All my Android devices have supported IPv6 as long as I've had it running on
my network. I don't have an iOS device but since T-Mobile sells them I assume
they work with IPv6.

~~~
zkms
> I don't have an iOS device but since T-Mobile sells them I assume they work
> with IPv6.

My iphone works perfectly with T-Mobile's ipv6 network -- it gets a v6 address
of its own and also anyone who tethers to it also gets v6 address.

------
simonster
Letter to MIT community:
[https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...](https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8ea4cce0)

tl;dr MIT is selling off half of 18.0.0.0/8 (8 million IPs)

~~~
takeda
heh, so they got the 18/8 for free, refused to replace /8 with /16 like other
universities did to help relieve IP shortage, but then they simply sold the 8
millions of the addresses for profit, while still hugging to remaining 8
million, even though that their student body size is only ~11,200.

I guess that's good for them, but it's still a dick behavior.

~~~
ghaff
AFAIK, Stanford was the only other university with a /8 though I may be wrong.
In any case, I'm not sure what the issue is with extracting money from Amazon
for something they own. There are plenty of companies that were in early on
that got /8s for relative pennies. Some even have two today by way of
acquisition.

------
sly010
Off-topic: When broadband came to my hometown around 2003 it was build out by
a local guy so I managed to ask him to provide us a static IP address. I am
always amused when I visit my parents that their IP address is still the same.

Off-offtopic: The cable modem broke down once. We called the guy, he picked it
up 20 minutes later, soldered the broken capacitor and we had our internet
back in 2 hours. It was on a Saturday.

He didn't have to do any of that, he had monopoly on broadband on the entire
area. Small ISPs are the best.

~~~
fao_
> He didn't have to do any of that, he had monopoly on broadband on the entire
> area. Small ISPs are the best.

I'm guessing part of it is because they only preside over a small area that
there's a human element to it, they must feel responsible for the internet of
these people, and they're close enough to them (in the hierarchy) that that
actually matters.

------
packetized
Looks like they SWIP'ed out the subnets of 18/8, transferred that object to
ARIN allocation, and transferred 18.145/16 to Amazon.

[https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-145-0-0-1.html](https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-145-0-0-1.html)

edit: Looks like a lot more than just 18.145/16, based on
[https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/AT-88-Z/nets](https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/AT-88-Z/nets)

------
imjustapie
An updated list of MIT's IPv4 address ownership:

[https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/MIT-2/nets](https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/MIT-2/nets)

~~~
sbierwagen
[https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-0-0-0-1.html](https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-18-0-0-0-1.html)

So they don't have 18.0.0.0/8, but they do have 18.0.0.0/9?

~~~
bitJericho
That's up to 8388608 addresses lost...

~~~
Someone
Sold, probably. Looking at
[https://www.leadertelecom.biz/ips/transfer](https://www.leadertelecom.biz/ips/transfer),
that could have brought in a nice sum of money (they ask #unicode code points
in dollars per 65,536 addresses)

~~~
strictnein
> "(they ask #unicode code points in dollars per 65,536 addresses)"

Could someone explain this? I feel like I'm missing something (not the 2^16
addresses, the "#unicode code points")

~~~
JoshTriplett
There are 1,114,112 Unicode code points (17 times 64k), and that particular
site happens to charge $17/IP, so for 64k IPs they happen to charge
$1,114,112. Same idea as "number of libraries of Congress" or "number of
Empire State Buildings", but nerdier.

~~~
strictnein
Thanks! That was very helpful.

edit: From wikipedia:

"Unicode comprises 1,114,112 code points in the range 0x0 to 0x10FFFF. The
Unicode code space is divided into seventeen planes (the basic multilingual
plane, and 16 supplementary planes), each with 65,536 (= 216) code points."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_point)

------
Artemis2
Wasn't it purchased by Amazon? I don't have a source unfortunately, except
this reddit thread: [https://redd.it/668ffg](https://redd.it/668ffg)

~~~
vabmit
[https://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=18.188.0.0?showDetails=tr...](https://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=18.188.0.0?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&showNonArinTopLevelNet=false&ext=netref2)

------
dpandey
Really glad to see this happen. I (MIT alum) think this was a legacy of the
past that had to change - MIT was just hoarding too many IP addresses. Not
blaming MIT - it was a historical artifact, but most other universities had
released theirs over the years and MIT hadn't.

------
aidenn0
Does HP still own 15/8 and 16/8? I remember visiting there once and everyone
had public internet addresses.

~~~
eric_the_read
"public" in the sense of theoretically routable, yes, but most of them were
firewalled off, so they might as well have been RFC1918 addresses for all the
good it did you.

The worst part about getting 16/8 from Compaq was that it wasn't contiguous
address space, so you couldn't use a single netmask for both. :(

~~~
syncsynchalt
It was contiguous, but didn't aggregate under a single bitmask. For example if
it had been 14/8 and 15/8 (instead of 15/8 and 16/8) then they would have held
the world's only /7.

------
d--b
For the uninitiated, can someone give a brief explanation of what that means?

~~~
pilom
Computers on the internet are pointed to by special numbers. Usually the
special numbers look like 4 numbers with '.' like 123.45.67.89 Each of those 4
numbers can be between 0 and 255 so (to be more simple) the lowest special
number would be 0.0.0.0 and the highest would be 255.255.255.255.

Back when the internet was still young, you would go to ARIN (the American
Registry of Internet Numbers) and say "I think I need 256 special numbers" and
they would give you a block of 256 of them. Something like 1.2.3.0 -
1.2.3.255. If you asked for about 65,000 special they might give you
231.45.0.0 through 231.45.255.255.

MIT (the Massachusettes Institute of Technology in Boston, MA, USA) was one of
the first people to ask for special numbers and so asked for over 16,000,000
of them (this was 1/256 of all of them) and so MIT was given
18.0.0.0-18.255.255.255.

Now today, all of the special numbers have given to people and companies. This
makes each special number extra special and large groups of special numbers
very extra special. Since MIT had 16,000,000 of the special numbers all next
to each other, they decided to sell half of their special numbers for a lot of
money.

Edit: Simple English:
[https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/](https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/)

~~~
VLM
I'm so old that I predate CIDR and in the old days before netmasks the netmask
was essentially implied by the first couple bits of an ip address so all msb
zero ip addrs were class A aka /8 allocations. All MSB 00 or whatever it was
were class B implying a netmask of 255.255.0.0 aka a /16 allocation.

Before CIDR you couldn't route or advertise rando netmasks like a /9 or a
/20\. There were no steps between a /16 and a /8 so if you convinced (someone,
forget who) that you "need" more than 65K ip addresses (and MIT is big enough
to need more, theoretically) then you got a /8.

A lot of noobs think ipv4 rolled out with CIDR; not so. For "a long time"
people had to make due with classful routing.

From memory, isn't RIP v1 only classful routing compatible? Been awhile since
I used something that old.

~~~
tbyehl
One of my friends took a CCNA class and had her mind blown by Class C != /24\.
I was shocked they're still teaching anything about classful networking in
2017. I think the last time I saw RIPv1 was 1998.

------
mterwill
University of Michigan has a few /16s that they still lease to all devices on
their network - wireless and wired.

------
trollied
xkcd explained what a mess the allocations were ages ago:
[https://xkcd.com/195/](https://xkcd.com/195/)

~~~
takeda
I guess that's just human nature, we are doing similar with IPv6 right now.
The smallest allocation for IPv6 is /64 that's 1.84467440737096E19 addresses.

~~~
syncsynchalt
Only similar if you ignore that there are 2^64 available /64s. We're never
going to be in danger of running out, so the use of /64s allows potentially
interesting application of the host part of the address (uses so far include
stateless autoconfiguration and privacy addresses).

~~~
droidist2
> We're never going to be in danger of running out.

Just wait until every cell in your body has its own IP.

~~~
aaronmdjones
An estimate for the number of cells in an adult human being is ~37.2 trillion
[1]. Let's be conservative and round that up to 40, and then assume that
everyone on earth is an adult, too.

There are currently 7.49 billion people in the world [2]. Let's be
conservative again and round that up to 8.

Multiplying these numbers gives us 3.2x10^23 cells. The IPv6 Global Unicast
address space (2000::/3) is 125 bits wide, for 2^125 = 4.3x10^37 combinations.
This gives us 1.33x10^14 addresses per cell.

Ofcourse, thinking about IPv6 in terms of number of addresses is wrong,
because you should be thinking in terms of number of networks (/64). That
gives us 2^(125-64) = 2.3x10^18 networks, or 0.000007 networks per cell, which
is 268054250 networks per person.

I think we're okay.

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-
are-372-trill...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-
are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/) [2]
[http://www.worldometers.info/world-
population/](http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/)

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

------
jhulla
LSC

------
anqh4
I wish all of those who own a /8 would release it unless they actually needed
it, that + cgnat would really help with the ipv4 shortage.

