Re: Interesting Ali Express web server behavior...

[Giorgio Bonfiglio via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

How big would a network need to get, in order to come close to exhausing RFC1918 address space? […] If one was to 
allocate 10 addresses to each host, that means it would require 1,789,132 hosts to exhaust the space.
Total availability is not usually the problem - poor allocation of space done in the 80s is.

I’ve worked with a telco a while ago which had ‘run out of 10/8’ by having allocated multiple /16s to their largest 
sites for lan/mgmt/control. The plan to ‘free up IP space’ included resetting practically every 20 years old air 
conditioner they had in the country and put them in a different subnet, same for fire and access control systems (air 
conditioners and fire control specifically didn’t support IP address change, you had to drop the entire config).

If you think about the scale of the operation then suddenly 33/8 becomes very, very appealing.


- Christopher H.

On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 at 18:45, Sabri Berisha <sabri () cluecentral net <mailto:sabri () cluecentral net> > wrote:
----- On Dec 9, 2023, at 9:55 PM, Owen DeLong via NANOG nanog () nanog org <mailto:nanog () nanog org> wrote:

Hi,

> Location: http://33.3.37.57/ <http://33.3.37.57/> 

> But why would AliExpress be redirecting to DDN space? Is this legitimate? Ali
> hoping to get away with squatting, or something else?

Not very long ago I worked for a well-known e-commerce platform where we nearly
ran out of RFC1918 space. We seriously considered using what was then
un-advertised DOD space to supplement RFC1918 space inside our data centers.

Perhaps AliExpress did get to that level of desperateness?

Thanks,

Sabri