On 14-apr-2007, at 12:16, Alexander Harrowell wrote:

[net 25/8]

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.

Ok, I wasn't clear: the problem here is that both ARIN and RIPE claim net 25.0.0.0/8 as "their own". This means that if you add up the address space managed by all the RIRs, net 25 gets counted twice. This is from the delegation information on their FTP servers:

# grep "|25\.0\.0\.0" delegated-*

delegated-arin-latest:arin|GB|ipv4|25.0.0.0|16777216|19850128|assigned

delegated-ripencc-latest:ripencc|GB|ipv4|25.0.0.0|16777216|19950101|allocated

Is it just me or does all of this have the odor of amateur hour around it? Inconsistencies between the various databases, IANA can't make http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space such that it's unambiguously parsable, ARIN backdates some of the address space it gives out, RIPE used to register address space under "UK" while that's not a valid country code (they fixed that last year, though), and so on.