Control Group ([info]control_group) wrote,
@ 2006-01-19 13:31:00
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"Holy /8, Batman!" -or- "Nerding out"
Wow. Just took a look at FixedOrbit.com's statistics page, and saw the top 10 networks list, by number of IP addresses controlled. The results are somewhat interesting. Tops on the list is DISA CONUS, or (effectively) the US military. Makes sense. The next four are the Tier 1s (owners of the backbone, essentially): Level 3, AT&T WorldNet, Cogent, and UUNET. Again, makes sense.

Coming at number 6?

Oh, go ahead, guess.

Take a stab. A shot in the dark.

Got one?

Think you've got it right?

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - MADISON.

WTF, MATES?

What on earth is the UW doing with eighteen million IP addresses? That's more than one complete class-A, for crying out loud, and there are only 64 of those to go around!

I'm completely boggled.

For the record, the next four are: Hewlett-Packard, Merit Network (I have no idea who this is), AT&T Global Network, and SBC Internet.


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[info]comkilserv
2006-01-19 08:25 pm UTC (link)
it makes more sense when you take into account that the uw madison has all of the normal robotics labs, farm research, etc. AND a full scale hospital...


wait

don't other schools have hospitals too?
hmm..

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[info]control_group
2006-01-19 08:43 pm UTC (link)
But eighteen million?

To put that in perspective, that's enough for every student enrolled at the UW to be assigned a new IP every day for fourteen months, without anyone overlapping, ever.

Or, put the other way, that's enough for every student enrolled at the UW to personally own 439 PCs with a static IP for each.

Or, enough for each resident of the whole farking state to have three static IPs!

And then people wonder why we're running out of IP addresses.

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[info]kingfox
2006-01-19 08:47 pm UTC (link)
That's just fucking batty and a half.

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[info]assfingers
2006-01-19 09:15 pm UTC (link)
I have a gut feeling like there is an obvious answer to this question that I am just too busy to remember, like "We, not Al Gore, invented the internet". (this specific scenario is clearly not the case. ask Mr Gore).

Outside of that sneaking suspicion, I do know that the hospital is an IP hog. DoIT has been allocated some 60,000 addresses to blanket the campus wirelessly. UWCU is also an IP whore.

It wouldn't surprise me if the WARF and/or the Waisman Center utilize IPs at a staggering rate, though I have no way to verify that.

Of course, as Mr Kilserv points out, any major university has similar hospitals, credit unions, research wings, and wireless projects... which really makes me think that I am forgetting something fairly obvious.

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[info]assfingers
2006-01-19 09:26 pm UTC (link)
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/news/story.asp?filename=474

so, err, we have an IP shortage.

something is very odd here.

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[info]control_group
2006-01-19 10:00 pm UTC (link)
Well, let's assume that DoIT has 60,000 IP addresses. Let's further assume that UWCU has 100k, another 100k for WARF, another 100k for Waisman, and 200k for the hospital (the extra 100k is for quality). That comes to 460,000 IP addresses. We've now accounted for...

...let me calculate...

...TWO PERCENT of the 18 million IPs the UW controls.

This, you see, is why the number is so boggling to me. It's huge.

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[info]assfingers
2006-01-19 10:08 pm UTC (link)
I was doing similar math while writing the comment and came up with a higher number, though not significantly.

Then, that article states that DoIT just added 65,000 to address a shortage. So they've obviously got over 60,000... but certainly not by a factor of 10.

Of course, seeing that, it reminds me that I think DoIT controls IP addresses for a very significant percentage of on-campus units (including some major ones, like the Med School)... so the numbers you assigned to the hospital, etc are going to be invalid in the other direction.

Something is really screwy here.

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(Anonymous)
2006-01-20 05:21 pm UTC (link)
To fix this looming problem, the campus has obtained a new block of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. When the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) recently established the 72.33.0.0/16 network for UW's use, it made available more than 65,000 new addresses, say engineers in the Network Services group at DoIT.

To be fair, 18 million new addresses is more than 65,000 new addresses.

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[info]andamaroo
2006-01-19 09:18 pm UTC (link)
I'm pretty sure 14 million of those belong to assfingers.

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[info]girlvixxxen
2006-01-19 09:34 pm UTC (link)
Don't almost all of UW's staff offices get routed through UW Madison's IPs?

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[info]assfingers
2006-01-19 09:41 pm UTC (link)
They do indeed.

That still doesn't make 18 million a reasonable number.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
craziness
[info]heidicron
2006-05-10 06:05 am UTC (link)
that is pretty damned startling I must say...

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