Re: Whoa; the 3 network?

[John Cavanaugh <aladin () cisco com>]

Hi,

In the beginning a lot of Fortune 100 companies were assigned Class 'A'
addresses.  In todays world of address shortages, the existence of NAT and
RFC1919 spaces make this hard to justify, but imagine the expense of having
to readdress hundreds of thousands of workstations and hosts.

Few of the original class A holders could rejustify their address
allocations today, but who are we to judge?  I was at Boeing during those
days and had access to 20+ class B addresses and a class A (we returned the
'A' :-).

I doubt HP, Xerox, IBM, GE, Mercedes etc want the expense of changing...  

John

At 11:53 AM 12/23/97 -0500, Randall Pigott wrote:
> At 07:08 AM 12/23/97 -0500, you wrote:
> > Funky discovery...  question is, why does GE need such massive addr space?
> > :)
> >
> > -=asr
> snip
> > > [root@newspeer1 /root]# whois 3.0.0.0  
> > > General Electric Company (NET-GE-INTERNET)
> > >    One Independence Way
> > >    Princeton, NJ  08540
> > >
> > >    Netname: GE-INTERNET
> > >    Netnumber: 3.0.0.0
>
> The Princeton address is the same as the old RCA company division that did
> DARPA and ARPA gov't contracting, so that address space once belonged to
> RCA "in the beginning".  I have personal experience in a past life doing
> military DARPA work with RCA, nearly twenty years ago, long before they
> formed RCA Astro and built communications satellites.  This address space
> was given to RCA for DARPA work *only* way back then or earlier.  RCA was
> one of the *first* contractors in the TCP/IP address space, and we worked
> on the very first gov't. task at the inception with them.  No such work has
> been done for years, and there is no reason for RCA/GE to have this address
> space anymore.
>
> Perhaps the real issue is - now that RCA was swallowed up years ago by the
> mighty GE in a lengthy acquisitions process, and no longer has any
> defensible need for this much address space, why do they still have it?  It
> is damn sure not being used for what it was originally intended, nor is it
> being used to anywhere near 80% of its capacity.
>
> I did a casual sequential-countup scripted "ping -a" on a small slice of
> 3.0.0.0, and found almost no working domains within this address space.
>
> Ever wonder?   How can they get away with keeping this much address space
> and NOT be using it, when we all jump through hoops to get our own little
> blocks of net numbers allocated?
>
> Just challenging the status quo again, (gave up tilting at windmills
> because my horse ran away.....)
>
> Randall