Draining the Swamp 

Most of us who’ve been around the Internet world for a while are familiar with the term ‘Swamp Space’ but for those who aren’t, it refers to those legacy IP addresses that were initially “allocated” under very vague terms back in the Internet dark ages, usually by IANA himself – Jon Postel [1].

Way back in those dark ages, a really interesting and colourful character known as Bill Manning went to IANA and told him how important internet exchange points were, and how it would be a Really Good Idea if they were given some IP addresses. Jon agreed, and I assume wrote the numbers 198.32.0.0 into his notebook with the words ‘Bill Manning’ or ‘Exchange Point Block’ next to them. This sort of process was the norm – informality and trust were the basis of much of the decision-making and rules for how addresses and other Internet resources were allocated. Australia’s own Geoff Huston held a block which he allocated under the name of AUNIC for Australian use.

Over the years, Bill travelled the world working with people to create over 60 IXPs and kept his own private registry of addresses [2], probably run on the same machine under his desk that he ran the B-root on [3]. Being a nice guy, he saw this as something he did to help folks out – he only ever invoiced what he thought people could pay, and did so sporadically. EP.net was happily the registrar for this block of numbers for quite some time or at least until around 2010 when he started to look to other projects.

By this stage, a few things had actually changed in the world of internet governance – IANA the man had become an entity operated by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and addresses were no longer assigned out of one man’s notebook, but by member organisations, known as Regional Internet Registries: ARIN, APNIC, RIPE, LACNIC and AFRINIC. Over time most of that legacy space was transferred into the relevant RIR; even Geoff handed the AUNIC address space over to APNIC for redelegation and management.
Why am I going down this trip on memory lane? Because such swamp space exists today on our network. Our original WA-IX is numbered with space that appears to have been redelegated to someone else.

I’ve had quite a fun time investigating this. That special type of ‘fun’ you usually have when your fingernails are removed with a pair of pliers… meaning having to read through ancient ARIN records and poke around in various archives… but it also meant catching up with some old friends who knew Bill and Jon quite well. With both Bill and Jon no longer with us, it’s a trifle difficult to find out exactly what happened.

It seems that some years ago, Bill transferred the address space over to another entity that (rumour has it) he controlled. Then in 2017, unbeknownst to us, it was sold to a large hosting player in the US who is now announcing the block to the broader internet. Looking back over our old documentation, it appears we did pay invoices for the space, for a range of amounts, and never had what would look like a rock-solid contract in place. As a result, notwithstanding that we have the high moral ground on this, we potentially can’t control the space and can’t lay a valid legal claim to it, at least not without spending a considerable amount of time and money on lawyers in foreign jurisdictions.

Of course, this means we need to renumber. We are now going through a process of allocating more address space and advising the affected members. It’s an unfortunate exercise we have to go through, but for the stability of the Internet, go through it we must.

On the upside, it does mean we can allocate a decent sized block of IP addresses that should give us enough space into the future to support WA-IX’s continuing growth.

So what do members on WA-IX need to do?

Members on WA-IX need to check their email to see their specific port listing with the affected addresses, and the new assignments.

Simply put, however:

• Only the network part of the address will change, so your new address is changing from 198.32.212.x to 27.106.192.x (where x is your existing host address) with a new subnet mask of 255.255.254.0 (ie /23)
• Simply (if you can) add 27.106.192.x as a secondary to your existing WA-IX port
• Configure peering exactly as you have it today using Route Servers rs1.wa at 27.106.192.1/23 and rs2.wa at 27.106.192.2/23
• Delete the old address after 12pm AEST 3 October 2023
• All Route Servers have automation enabled, so any updates to your peering configuration will be automatically applied to all Route Servers.

Explicit detail including all affected member IP addresses have been sent to the technical contacts of all members on WA-IX. Filters will be applied after 12pm AEST 3 October 2023 to drop the previous address range – at this point we will no longer lay any claim to it for the future, so need to relinquish any use.

Happy Peering,
Narelle

References:
[1] History of the Internet 
[2] EP.net website from the Wayback Machine: 
[3] Ghosts of Root Servers Past