Comment by hhh

4 days ago

I do know of at least one company who has black-holed the entire DoD ip space and are using it for internal space, which is why I gave a speculation warning... it's really strange regardless.

I recently troubleshot an installation for someone where at some point in the past they'd picked 1.1.1.0/24 as their address range because "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated".

You know, I'm not sure I can explain how I feel about this properly without waving the shotgun around.

  • I had a gig for a contractor of some banks once. One of the banks was using 5.0.0.0/8 internally. I asked the guy if it doesn't lead to issues. All the time, he said. When they first came in, they just assigned each bank 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8, and so on. Number ten feels really lucky, he said.

    • As long as it's strictly separated from the internet it works. The Internetwork Packet Exchange, used for cellular roaming, is a parallel global internet with its own addresses and allocation policies.

    • This story is so silly it must be true. Thank you, made me laugh out loud.

  • LOL, they should have just used a 10.x space instead if they wanted slightly simpler numbers.

    On the shotgun, or adjacent, I do tend to prefer ammo classes for my nets... 10.22.x.y, where x may be 1, 38, 45, etc. Allows for site to site vpn with friends/family a bit easier to remember.

    • I dunno, seems like it could be a bit vague. Does 45 refer to 45 Webley or 45 GAP? Could possibly also refer to 45 Colt I guess, if you're boring. But 45 Colt, 45 ACP, 45 Colt Government?

      Also, just in case this comment isn't pedantic enough, 10.22 would be a firearm range, not an ammo range. And AFAIK they only ever chambered that for .22 rimfire cartridges. ;)

  • Didn't AT&T do that and Cloudflare made them change it when they aquired that space?

    • I got a "home" Verizon box, and the first thing I did was change the DNS setting... 1.1.1.1 wasn't working, and I wanted to change it back to default. Verizon's tech support are idiots... they literally wouldn't give me the default DNS IP because they were concerned about security.

      Google's DNS worked fine, but Cloudflare's didn't. No idea if they ever fixed it... I'm using it as a backup for my main connection, eventually I'll setup autofailover on my router (OpnSense). For now, I just swap the cables.

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  • Sounds like someones on the path to sovereign citizenship. I can't wait for our cyber-sovereign citizenships who deny various IP ranges coming from the government's domain naming system.

  • Yet another thing ipv6 solves. Yeah you can do the officially supported fdXX:XXXX:XXXX:... but you can also just pick something like 1::1 and it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range.

    If you're gonna do that, though, it's better if you use fd00:... or one of the other assigned ranges so it's still in the standard range. OSes use this as a heuristic for source address selection.

    • > Yet another thing ipv6 solves. ... it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range

      I'm not familiar with IPv6's details, could you elaborate on this? To me, this reads like you're saying that IPv6 solves the problem by having low adoption rates rather than an actual function of the protocol.

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Interesting -- seems like the side effect would be to basically prevent use by the DoD but not really anyone else. Bonus points if they sell a "government" version for higher cost

I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.

  • If they converted to IPv6, they could easily have a globally unique address space. Real globally unique, not probabilistic.

    • The fact that the network concentrator co uses DoD v4 address space to avoid conflicts implies that their clients are bringing v4 addresses, so IPv6 is utterly irrelevant in this situation.

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This will trip up most SOC workflows in funny ways, and I like it.

IPs having a global distinction between public/private is a convention, but local routing can widely differ.

Same with the "China Cyberattacks" - the guys sitting on top of my outgoing fiber can simulate any IP address they want to me.

Yeah I wanted to do that at previous company. Got talked out of it, but it's nice have all those ips available.

I don't remember which but one of the major US cellular networks was using the DoDs 7.0.0.0/8 internally. It was never an issue since the DoD kept that /8 offline but the IPs would show up in traceroutes. I had to tell many people to ignore it.

I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.

there's a couple subnets I (ab)use in the DOD IP space for my home network knowing they'd never put them on the open internet. it's also fun to throw logging for a loop if someone digs.

22.0.0.0/8 - it's basically free real estate!

  • the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?

    • >the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?

      Just to chime in agreeing with sibling comments, the issue is when it's not about just your house and you're deep into self-hosted stuff with a lot of different properties and businesses other people's houses all sharing resources. Without a lot of coordination and consideration, which in practice doesn't really happen easily given the adhoc nature such things tend to organically develop out of, and all the random stuff that wants specific addresses at least for setup, it actually gets pretty easy to run into collisions. Allocations typically are definitely inefficient in many respects but also made sense in the context they were first done and of course can be a certain amount of effort to change.

      In an ideal world I sorta feel like "IPv6" should have been more along the lines of <12 octet prefix>:<IPv4>, everyone gets a prefix or set of prefixes that they actually own and are consistent worldwide, or at least only change when geographic location changes, and then can just have the entire 32-bit IPv4 space for LAN however they want. Then you only have to care about prefix between LANs and it could all be extremely automated, internally you only need to use something that looks like IPv4 with the network hardware transparently able to handle prefixes for WAN. Backwards compatibility story would be a lot more straight forward too. Oh well.

      @kotaKat: that's a great idea and I don't know why I forgot I played with that like 15 years ago. Really handy as a backup space that almost certainly won't collide with any commercial hardware at least.

    • I work for a large organisation that has various blocks scattered around 10./8, some with highish values for the second octet and some with lowish values, so say 10.129.0.x/24 and 10.3.0.x/24 to pick just two out of a couple of thousand.

      But one of our vendor networks uses 10.32.x.x/32 for various radio gateways, and the radios themselves all locally expose (this is where I give away too big a clue as to what I do) 10.0.0.101 as a management address that emits important link status data.

      So you can imagine what a godawful bùrach everyone's routing tables are.

    • i deal with a lot of nerds that are all interconnected with one another and nobody can agree on a common subnet for their houses when we all decide to exchange routes internally. ;)

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  • The CGNAT space (100.64.0.0/10) is also free real estate for container virtual/overlay networks when you don't want to (or can't, thanks to IT) use the RFC-1918 subnets.

  • I also do this, except 7.0.0.0/8 instead. Its great for not conflicting with hotel wifi dhcp.