Also, they don't have any special-case handling that I am aware of. I tried to get a private /24 to use for the topology examples in my books and couldn't get one. ARIN outright refused the request even though I could prove the need for it, and even though I didn't care about global routing or reachability.
Well, to me it sounds like you wanted your own /24, came up with an excuse, and they saw right through it. I mean, if you need IP space for your book, 192.168/16 and 10/8 are popular choices.
Well - a bit off to the side of this topic, but when has that stopped anyone on this list... I seem to recall that 192.0.2.0/24 was reserved for just this type of use. I can't find an RFC that explicitly says "192.0.2.0/24 is reserved for documentation and example code" though the block has been reserved by ARIN and Bill Manning's got an Internet Draft saying as much (http://www.isi.edu/~bmanning/dsua.html). Anyone have a reference to the official word on this? Eric :)