in the spirit of the holiday season, i apologize for my "stupid experiment" comment.
At 06:11 PM 12/23/97 +0000, some abusive halfwit wrote:
GE is heavily firewalled; i'm not suprised you didn't get any answers.
stupid experiment, really.
And a stupid comment, really. No wonder GE no longer wants his services.
detailed technical discussion that i don't dispute, and probably agree with, omitted.
I challenge GE to say that this is not so, and provide pertinent and defensible facts and figures to back it up. I believe that if the truth were know, Jack Kelly and gang are guilty of definitely warehousing
i think that you mean "Jack Welch".
hundreds of thousands and almost certainly millions of unneeded public IP addresses because they think they can get away with it and for no other reason.
i think you have no comprehension of how GE works. GE has, over a period of years, consolidated their address space into 3 as they become better integrated with the public internet. at one time, this space was exposed to the public. having been badly burned by hackers once or twice, GE has moved most, if not all, of this space behind firewalls; based on conversations i had with some of the GE R&D systems staff a year or so back, i believe that their intent is that little, of any, of 3.0.0.0/8 is to be exposed to the open net; the gateways that i've used in the past use addresses in 192.something as their public face. so there are probably no technical reasons why GE couldn't just hand 3.0.0.0/8 back -- because of the firewalling; they probably don't really even need to renumber into 10.0.0.0/8 (and based on my experience, any effort to renumber the corporation from 3 to 10 would be doomed to failure.). the reasons why the addresses won't be returned are part of corporate culture, and have to do with the fact that there is little motivation for GE to hand the old Class A back -- they aren' t paying for it, and aren't going to in the near future, and if ARIN tried to charge them for it, it'd just result in a court case -- GE has very good lawyers on retainer, and lots of them.
We through ARIN and others should be reallocated this address space for the public use of our subscribers.
greater good arguments don't cut it with GE management, unless it's for the greater good of the shareholders. richard -- Richard Welty Chief Internet Engineer, INet Solutions welty@inet-solutions.net http://www.inet-solutions.net/~welty/ 888-311-INET