Private vs Public IP's

You probably mean 169.254.x.x ???

The wise Tom enlightened me with:

I guess these are people who don't really care about the public networks they can't reach anymore. It's still public IP space

Mark

I'm guessing as well that he really means 169.254.0.0/16. The reserved link-local IP address block.

Nope...it's 192.169.2.1 and a few others with 192.169.x.x... I just wanted to make sure because I need to point this out in a meeting. I didn't think they should be used, but just wanted a little validation.

Thanks much!

192.169.2.0/23 & 192.169.4.0/24 have been allocated to FMC Technologies, Inc. So its definately not private space.

I would guess that it might have started with a typo, or perhaps someone followed on from 168.

As discussed, it is in the Public address space.

Thanks Everyone...turns out that the person who is doing this just does not accept it as a problem and I'm having to pound it into upper management to try to get them to see the importance because it's part of our product.

Thanks for the comments:)

Funny true story - about 10 years ago I worked for an international telecommunications carrier that spun off a wireless division. The technical side folks picked as their address space that which was used by the University of North Carolina. Which of course was fine until we wanted to get to the Sun Microsystems public web repositories [ sunsite ..... ] and other similar sites Eventually they had to re- number and when I left the company (not in any way related) there were around 13,000 employees. I am not aware of a worse choice of addressing space

I wish you every success. You might like to point out to upper management that your competitors could highlight this 'feature' of your product in comparisons with their products.

I have a customer with a router provided by a Large Multinational, configured with an IPsec tunnel for remote access into Large Multinational's systems [my customer writes software for them]. Large Multinational have a /22 and a few /24s carved out of two /8's, yet insist on using large swathes of both /8s internally. Every month or so I have to create another exception on my customer's ASA because they can't access yet another website, hosted by an innocent third party on an address they own in one of those /8s.

192.169.0.0/23 is assigned to 'psg.com'. 192.169.2.0/22 is assigned to 'uu.net'. 192.169.6.0/24 is not assigned to anybody _yet_. *Nothing in '192.169.0.0/16 should be used as 'private' address space. It is _guaranteed_ you will have problems with it down the road.

The authoritative reference for what is usable as 'private' addresses is RFC 1918.

Does the block 192.0.68.0/24 ring any bells with you?

There was a company -- a user of Sun microsystems workstations, that

*registered* that block as their space.

Oddly enough, they started getting complaint calls from *ALL*OVER* about why machines from their network were doing 'bad things' to other networks.

For those who don't know/remember, 192.0.68.x was the default address-space used by Sun for _all_ the products they shipped. (This was long before CIDR _or_ RFC 1918) *EVERYBODY* who wasn't Internet connected just used that default address-space. Which made for all sorts of 'fun and games' when they _did_ get a 'net connection.

_Using_ 192.0.68.x was somewhat understandable. registering 'ownership' of it, *and* arranging for it to be =routed= to your location was a _really_ BAD IDEA(tm)!!

When I discovered that registration, I spoke the admin there (they were a vendor we dealt with), and said "you didn't _really_....?", got a _very_ embarrassed "yeah, well, we DIDN'T know any better at the time" response.

the only good thing that came out of it was that they very rapidly developed a _LARGE_ (**VERY* large) pool of admin contacts at other networks. On more than one occasion when I was chasing something down, I'd simply call that admin, and ask "who's the contact for ....." and he'd have the instant answer. :)

Sorry for the delay. Thing is if I was presented with a product that required *ANY* static IP range other than one registered to the product's manufacturer I would ROFL.

Then I would kick the sales team out - forever.

If I found that some product was using an address range registered to someone else I would have them escorted from the premises and make sure that we never dealt with them ever again in any capacity.

What you describe is simply stupid.