Bogon filtering (posted 2003-04-10)

On august 7th 2002, Rob Thomas announced on his bogon list and a number of mailinglists that IANA had delegated the 69.0.0.0/8 address block to APNIC for further distribution to ISPs and end-user organizations in the Asia-Pacific region. The next day, APNIC made an announcement of their own.

Exactly seven months later, someone who had gotten addresses in the new range posted a message to the NANOG under the title "69/8...this sucks". He encountered problems reaching certain destinations from the new addresses and wrote a script to test this. It turned out a significant number of sites ("dozens") still filtered this range.

Further investigation uncovered that this wasn't so much a routing problem, but many firewall administrators also use the bogon list to create filters. And then subsequently fail to keep those filters up to date.

This sucks indeed.