Gotta deal with it in a historical perspective as well. GE has had IP space almost since the epoch. Much of their network dates from well before well understood subnetting. Heck some of it dates back to the time of the IMP. (Think about every network you've ever inherited...None of them were ever 'right' were they? Now picture one 20+ years in the evolutionary making.) No reason it could not be further optimized, but renumbering hundreds of thousands of machines is not a trivial exercise. And we are talking about > 10^6 machines. Research & Development, a site I formerly worked at, was well over 2K machines alone. 1000 sites with 100 machines is not unimaginable. Toss in subnetting and the fact that, as I recall, there is little central administration of the space, and it becomes a non-trivial issue to re-address it all. GE certainly isn't the only /8 holder out there, nor are they the only one with this kind of problem. I think there are a lot more wasted /16's out there than we may realize, particularly with corporate consolidation being what it is. I can think of several folks with 3 or more /16's resulting from corporate consolidation, all of which could be consolidated into one, but the pain of doing so is high compared to the pain of hiding or refusing to deal with the problem. You gonna move folks with a carrot or a stick? But it's probably time to remove this thread from NANOG. Bob ---------- From: Cameo Davine[SMTP:cameo@netsys.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 1997 10:08 AM To: Bono, Vinny (CAP, ITS, US) Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Whoa; the 3 network? All acquired companies. Does that include the /18 of MAI Network Services since that was acquired by GE as well? On Tue, 23 Dec 1997, Bono, Vinny (CAP, ITS, US) wrote: | |Well, GE is the largest corporation in the world. The total employees |in all seven divisions and their components is just over 1.7 million. |That is a lot. Add in all the IP devices in NBC's network alone and |you've got a huge number of justifiable space right there. Further, |they, uh sorry, we, :-) are renumbering all acquired companies into the |3.0.0.0/8 range and returning the historic class B's (i.e. Ameridata, |Bodan, etc.). | |Vincent J. Bono |Comstor Corporation |A GE Capital Service Company - P.800.311.4219*C.703.867.4357 cameo.d.wood