[NCLUG] Need help identifying a mystery network

[J. Paul Reed]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Marcio Luis Teixeira wrote:

> IANA (NETBLK-LINKLOCAL)
>    Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
>    4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
>    Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
>    US
>
>    Netname: LINKLOCAL
>    Netblock: 169.254.0.0 - 169.254.255.255
>
>    Coordinator:
>       Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers  (IANA-ARIN)
> res-ip at iana.org
>
> Does anyone know who these people are?

Why they're the IANA, of course.

They (used to, anyway) give network allocation assignments out to people
like ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC.

Oddly enough, 169.254.0.0/16 isn't mentioned in RFC 1918, which documents
the private address space (10/8, 192.168/16 and their ilk), but according
to other documents, that block has been assigned a "special
purpose"/private allocation:

"169.254.0.0/16 has been ear-marked as the IP range to use for end node
auto-configuration when a DHCP server may not be found. As such, network
operations and administrators should be VERY aggressive in ensuring that
neither route advertisements nor packet forwarding should occur across any
media boundaries. This is true for the Internet as well as any private
networks that use the IP protocols. End node administrators should be aware
that some vendors will auto-configure and add this prefix to the nodes
forwarding table. This will cause problems with sites that run router
discovery or deprecated routing protocols such as RIP."