Those who argue that IPv4 addresses must be reclaimed seem to have forgotten that even for small organizations, converting IPv4 address space to RFC1918 addresses, or IPv6, is a huge task given the fixed IP addresses of many devices (printers, copy machines, etc.), and even worse, the many key business application programs that use hard-coded IP addresses instead of DNS resolution. Many of these application programs were written many years ago, and are poorly supported, such that making code changes places a company's business success on the line. Of course, unused /8 prefixes appear to be an abuse, but as some have noted in this thread, many large organizations were assigned /8s decades ago, and have used them for IP addressing for key business functions. David On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:
http://paritynews.com/network/item/325-department-of-work-and-pensions-uk-in...
Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses
Written by Ravi Mandalia
Department of Work and Pensions UK in Possession of 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses
The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire block of '/8' IPv4 addresses that is unused and an e-petition has been filed in this regards asking the DWP to sell it off thus easing off the RIPE IPv4 address space scarcity a little.
John Graham-Cumming, who found this unused block, wrote in a blog post that the DWP was in possession of 51.0.0.0/8 IPv4 addresses. According to Cumming, these 16.9 million IP addresses are unused at the moment and he derived this conclusion by doing a check in the ASN database. “A check of the ASN database will show that there are no networks for that block of addresses,” he wrote.
An e-petition has been filed in this regards. “It has recently come to light that the Department for Work and Pensions has its own allocated block of 16,777,216 addresses (commonly referred to as a /8), covering 51.0.0.0 to 51.255.255.255”, reads the petition.
The UK government, if it sells off this /8 block, could end up getting £1 billion mark. “£1 billion of low-effort extra cash would be a very nice thing to throw at our deficit,” read the petition.
Cumming ends his post with the remark, “So, Mr. Cameron, I'll accept a 10% finder's fee if you dispose of this asset :-)”.