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Re: Whoa; the 3 network?

  • From: Ran Atkinson
  • Date: Wed Dec 31 11:00:56 1997 
On Dec 23 11:53, Randall Pigott wrote:

% 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".

  False statement and faulty logic.  GE merely changed the address
for the GE folks handling their network address to be the office
in Princeton.

  Net 3 has always been GE address space, even before GE repurchased
RCA during the 80s.  In fact, for many years the Net 3 entry at
the SRI NIC pointed to a GE Simulation facility in Florida
because someone there was the address allocation stuckee for
all of GE.

% 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 might have been given address space back then, but it wasn't
Net 3.  In the early 80s, when RCA was not owned by GE, GE had
already been alloated Net 3 by the SRI NIC.  I was a GE employee
at the time and involved in renumbering some internal networks
into Net 3 at the time.

% 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.
[stuff deleted here]
>-- End of excerpt from Randall Pigott

  Ping turns out to be a remarkably ineffective tool at measuring
the utilisation of addresses or accessibility of hosts.

  Many a host that I've managed was not visible via ping, but was
in fact directly on The Internet and reachable via telnet/rlogin/ftp
_only from authorised hosts_ which were also on the Internet.
Connection attempts from unauthorised hosts were silently dropped.
No point in making it easy on the bad guys.  This was done within
some parts of GE at least as far back as the mid 1980s.  It helped
to have a 4.2 BSD source license. :-)

Ran
[email protected]

PS: Apologies for posting content onto the NANOG list...