BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem
bgp.tools298 points by RGBCube 2 days ago
298 points by RGBCube 2 days ago
I find the map the most interesting map: https://map.bgp.tools/
And did not know Mercedes holds such a large block (53.0.0.0/8), and it appears to be mostly dark or unused.
See "List of assigned /8 blocks to commercial organizations" at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
Mercedes-Benz isn't the only corporation with its own /8 block - although it is the only non-US one; and it's a pretty small exclusive list, only six in total. I guess someone at Mercedes-Benz just happened to hear about this Internet thing relatively early (53.0.0.0/8 was registered Oct 1993 according to Wikipedia - the relevant European authority, RIPE NCC, was only founded in Apr 1992), and/or happened to have a buddy at IANA / RIPE NCC, and the rest is history.
Does anyone know what the red striped sections are? Hovering them only yields < <range> is excluded from scanning, but that doesn’t say much
They're part of AS749, which is US Department of Defense IP space that appears to be unused and which, based on public statements made by the Pentagon, might just be safely parked or might be part of a network scanning observatory [1]. Either way, scanning that space is probably a waste of bandwidth.
Maybe a bit off topic, but years ago I had a home linux server, used for usenet/torrenting. I was just poking about on it one day and ran some variation of netstat and could see a connection with a 6.x.x.x range IP address, which stood out. I didn't know a whole lot about networking at the time (still don't), couldn't say if I had misinterpreted what I saw in the netstat output. But it stood out so I looked it up and hoo-boy, it was a shock to see who owned that IP range, Army Information Systems Centre. I chalked it up to them maybe running a torrent tracker or something, or was the DoD in my PC?
Service providers (especially mobile ones) often squat on large, unused IP blocks (of which the DoD has plenty of), especially at peak capacity. I suspect this is what occurred here.
> Either way, scanning that space is probably a waste of bandwidth
That's what the DoD wants you to think ;)
The map also does a good job showing why we need to do away with multicast/class E and reuse the address space.
At this point, time would be better spent moving to IPv6, don't you think?
We have been trying to deploy IPv6 for 20 years now. This would be comparatively easier and buy us another 20 years to finish v6 deployment.
A ton of old equipment would need to be upgraded to use 240/4 for IPv4 unicast. We'd run into weird issues where it works for some people and not others. I'm not convinced. If this was done 25 years ago, maybe.
And 50% of the internet traffic is IPv6. The proposal here is to introduce a separate (arguably harder) change which would start at 0% support again. Beyond that, it'd just be a temporary fix.
Just 240/4 allowed specifically for private network use (like the 10/8 range)... that I could get behind though. This would still exclude 255.255.255.255/32 of course.
The problem is that you can't really move completely to IPv6. You actually will have to run both IPv4 and IPv6 networks indefinitely. Which isn't a lot of fun.
Now, yes. But eventually, we'll reach a tipping point where that isn't necessary. When? Your guess is as good as mine.
"You actually will have to run both IPv4 and IPv6 networks *indefinitely*."
You can’t use multicast because multicast addresses work today on private networks
Surely something from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses could be repurposed?
Why? It would be to the benefit of relatively few and be an enormous technical problem for decades for everyone. If we did this, the IPv4 addresses would run out again after a few months at most, leaving us all in the same position we are in today, but also with a huge technical problem of fixing all the old devices which had these now-repurposed networks hardcoded.
If you are fine with doing the work of obsoleting old equipment, then just start using IPv6.
No. It will take 10 years for everyone to update their router configuration/software to treat the new “formely-reserved” addresses as global unicast. There’s no point in doing that whatsoever. That effort would be spent much better by adopting IPv6.
240/4 can be hijacked/used as private IP space currently by a lot of devices. I think Windows might be the hold out. But for internal routing and IoT it’s very useful. Can never be used as publicly routable space.
I’d like to see it added to the official list of private space alongside RFC1918.
Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8, but I suppose it looks even cooler too those who know and find such things cool.
Does Windoze prevent you from using certain IPv4 addresses?
> Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8
Large organizations have moved to IPv6 because they, and everyone else, are using 10/8, and so when mergers and acquisitions happen trying to connect the networks together becomes a nightmare.
See this talk from Wells Fargo as an example:
The pain of merging acquired company networks cannot be overstated!
IPv6 can help, but in my experience there's just soo much old IPv4 tech that no one is prepared to migrate to IPv6.
Aws sized companies, we also use them in aws. And no doesn't work on windows.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast... is a nice historical overview of 240/4
Holy cow. Didn’t realize there is an entire /4 reserved for future use.
I'd guess they bought a whole block early on because they could and it wasn't too expensive yet. I wonder if they could be compelled to auction it off. But they might be using it a lot internally.
(a lot of guesswork in this comment, I don't know anything lol)
no, no one bought anything, they just emailed some dude and said "hey we're connecting to The Internet, we need some IPs" and the reply was "here is the 2^24 IP addresses dedicated to you".
In the early days no money changed hands at all. You just asked for a block and got one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83NJllv0q9U was a nice behind the cover peek into how the data is collected and parsed.
Previously:
BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531988 - June 2023 (17 comments)
A while ago there was a large data center outage that effected a lot of popular services and I speculated it might have been BGP, but it wasn't.
During that time I was trying to learn BGP on-the-fly enough to know if this was a thing and I didn't have a lot of luck.
What are some good methods or tools to know if BGP is causing a large scale outage before other experts have reported it?
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing might be of interest for aggregated data that doesn't require a complete understanding of the internet. The global looking glass that bgp.tools has is pretty powerful too, but it gives you a lot of data, so if you don't know what you're looking for or what it should look like it's hard to say something is wrong.
Its usually not BGP, its some operator misconfiguring BGP, and there's loads of ways of doing that and its hard to know what that would look like from a remote view like your own network. Most efficient way is to just compare current bad state to previous good state and look at the diff, ie what changed for some prefix in your table compared to previous version of your table.
This tool looks really good. It seems like soon ASN level bot-curbing will become common.
It is really good for blocking whole Chinese & LLM scraper ASNs!
why u have to mention Chinese?
Anyone who has operated a public webserver knows that the vast majority of the rabid, robots.txt ignoring hyperscrapers are from Chinese autonomous systems
cidr-report.org has been around for over 20 years, curious why you think this site now will make a difference with blocking bots?
Most people don't know about it; in fact most of the IP geolocation providers pull their data from cidr-report.org or thyme.apnic.net.
I'm not shocked. ASN blocking is well-known among people who I can easily called experts (veterans which can set up a reasonable-ish firewall from base principles) and ASN control is exposed in major cloud firewalls, but younger people (except those who were trained with deep networking skills) don't really understand ASNs for some reason.
bgp.tools is one of my most used sites - thanks to ben for doing this so great!
Pretty zany.
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