
Microsoft Azure’s use of non-US IPv4 address space in US regions - computer
http://blog.azure.com/2014/06/11/windows-azures-use-of-non-us-ipv4-address-space-in-us-regions/
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k3oni
I would say that this is going to become a normal occurrence soon in many
other IT companies running out of IPv4 space. An easy way currently to get
more IPv4 space is for example to buy them from other regions like EUs RIPE.

RIPE for example actually sold IPv4 classes at some point so all those are
actually owned by their respective owners and can be rented out or outright be
sold. In order to be able to use any of these RIPE IP spaces all you will need
is to have a valid PA account/membership with RIPE and you can use them
anywhere and not only in EU.

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gavinpc
This is not limited to the US, either. I have an Azure account hosted in the
North Europe datacenter (in Dublin), and our IP addresses are associated with
Brazil in the GeoIP databases.

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blablabla123
Oh, this is why I can't download Youtube videos via Azure VMs.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
How did the phrase "non-US IPv4 address space" even acquire meaning? The
purpose on an IP address is to name a system on the internet such that you can
send packets to it. WTF does that have to do with geography? (Apart from the
fact that you might generally want to aggregate geographically close systems
into contiguous address ranges in order to keep routing tables managable, but
that obviously has exactly zero to do with borders of countries and stuff like
that, and more with the physics of signal propagation ...)

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k3oni
I think this has more to do with GeoIP databases than anything else and
registry CIDRs allocations across the world.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Yeah - but what's the point of GeoIP databases? Most if not all of the use
cases are idiotic. The browser tells me that the user understands English and
French, but since the GeoIP database tells me the client's address is
"brazilian", I'll deliver portuguese text! WTF? Similarly, routing requests to
servers in the same country is kinda stupid - you want to achieve
responsiveness, and responsiveness comes from shortest paths in the network
graph, not from being inside the borders of the same country, or even from
shortest geographic distance. In that case some suboptimal routing at least
should be of little consequence, so it might be a usable approximation.
Limiting access to content because you are in the wrong place is about as
counter to the idea of the internet as you can get, so it's idiotic simply
because of that. There simply is no sane reason to even have a concept of a
"location of an IP address", other than its location in the network graph for
packet routing purposes.

(edit: and the first one of those is causing lots of unnecessary pain, not
only to travellers who suddenly have to deal with a "different internet"
simply because they moved their body to a different place on the planet, but
also for people in multi-lingual countries, who regularly have to deal with
moronic websites forcing them into some particular language version that
supposedly is the "language of their location", ignoring the fact that the
user not only doesn't understand the language, but specifically tells the
server via appropriate headers which languages the user understands.)

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junto
This is a pet hate of mine. Tech companies, especially US ones have a horrible
habit of assuming language preference based on location. In Spain != Spanish.
Or do say 14 million Catalan speakers anyway. Whenever I travel abroad I
notice how sites ignore my Accept-Language HTTP header. It is just impolite.

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qwerta
I read somewhere that MIT or Stanford have more IP addresses than China or
Africa. Perhaps there is an option to buy those?

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danyork
No, Stanford gave that block back in 2000. See:
[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/06/with-t...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/06/with-the-americas-running-out-of-ipv4-its-official-the-
internet-is-full/)

Microsoft has been purchasing blocks of IPv4 space (they bought some off of
Nortel a few years back). Obviously they don't have enough.

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andrewguenther
I understand that there are really no other options, but this is a pretty bad
place to be in. It doesn't sound like Azure can make any hard guarantees that
this issue will go away, only that it will be "alleviated." That wouldn't make
me feel good as a customer.

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aembleton
Why can't they move to IPv6?

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pilif
Because then services offered by their customers would not be reachable for
over 97% of the internet.

I would assume that's bad for business.

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wmf
Many cloud customers would be fine with IPv6-only VMs and one IPv4 adddress on
the outside of their load balancer. Yet cloud providers are building the
opposite architecture.

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sneak
Most cloud customers are fine with RFC1918-IPv4-space VMs and one IPv4 address
on the outside of their load balancer.

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valarauca1
This kinda leads me ask. Why don't we start allocating the E-Block? I know its
a shitty solution and IPv6 would be better, but isn't that a short term
bandage?

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dylz
if you mean 240.0.0.0->end, it is actively in use for private purposes..

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duskwuff
And a lot of IP stacks will treat any traffic from it as invalid. Even if the
standards were revised to declare it as usable, it'd be impossible to use in
practical terms.

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pdw
So I guess the next step is to buy the remaining African address space?

