[ih] Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life

[Karl Auerbach]

On 4/26/21 10:46 AM, Scott Brim via Internet-history wrote:

>> I have read several of the articles on this, anyone know what was really
>> going on?

> **Apparently** the DoD has contracted with that company to detect people
> using net 11 and clean them up. The advertisement is legit, the agreement
> is legit, and it's too bad nobody thought to let the (rest of the) Internet
> know they were about to advertise 11/8.

If they are advertising this as a single /8 it is unlikely that they 
will catch many folks who are camping on smaller blocks of that space 
because route selection will tend to use the longest match prefix rather 
the the rather short /8 prefix.

If they really want to sweep the space to locate usurping uses they 
probably need to advertise that /8 as a sequence of /24s.  And rather 
than announcing all 64K of those at once (and probably generating a lot 
of complaints among the BGP community) they would probably need to do a 
few at a time, letting them sit for a week or two, and then retracting 
them.  That will take long time to do (years.)

We used to have a distantly related issue on the Interop show network, 
45/8 (which we broke down as /21 subnets.)  Various vendors had gear 
that would try to explore the entire space - and they had never 
encountered anything larger than a /24 before.

	--karl--