On 4/14/07, Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> wrote:

Another interesting case:

025/8   Jan 95   UK Ministry of Defense              (Updated - Jan 06)

# whois -h whois.arin.net 25.0.0.0 | more
OrgName:    DINSA, Ministry of Defence
OrgID:      DMD-16
Address:    DINSA, HQ DCSA
Address:    H4, Copenacre
City:       Corsham
StateProv:  Wiltshire
PostalCode: SN13 9NR
Country:    GB

Fair enough. RAF Corsham is the HQ of DINSA and a few other military comms and IT orgs.

NetRange:   25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255
CIDR:       25.0.0.0/8
NetName:    RSRE-EXP
NetHandle:  NET-25-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType:    Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1.CS.UCL.AC.UK
NameServer: RELAY.MOD.UK
Comment:
RegDate:    1985-01-28
Updated:    2005-09-06

Ah. I think you'll find this is a result of there being some legacy stuff from before the UK NIC, Nominet, was set up in 1996. Before then, the de facto authority was the academics, JANET, working out of the University of London Computer Centre. Hence cs.ucl.ac.uk getting in there.

There are a few domain names in a similar position - post nominet, the .uk zone was reorganised to assign 2LDs like *.gov.uk, but there were already a few 1LD .uk assignments, notably mod.uk and parliament.uk. I'm not sure if it's been cleared up who is responsible for them.