AS10779 STEPBROBD

STEPBROBD is a small personal and research network run by Yifei Sun, a distributed-systems/HPC PhD researcher, incorporated as StepBroBD, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. RIS sees just 2 IPv4 prefixes (512 addresses), 7 IPv6 /48s, and 7 observed neighbours.

What it's used for

Self-hosted services and networking experimentation, not commercial hosting. The IPv4 footprint is two /24s (192.104.136.0/24 and 23.161.104.0/24); the IPv6 side is the larger half, with seven /48s announced individually, all of them adjacent within 2602:f590::. The one sampled PTR, isere.sd.ysun.co, sits under the operator's own personal domain and is named for the French Isère department, consistent with a machine hosted near the operator's academic base rather than in a customer-facing datacentre.

Notable

The transit mix is the giveaway that this is a hobbyist-grade network rather than an enterprise one: upstreams drawn from budget and community-friendly carriers (Vultr's The Constant Company, xTom, Virtua Systems and a personally-held ASN) instead of the tier-1s an eyeball or corporate network would buy. Seven neighbours against 512 addresses is exactly the shape of a single operator multihoming for fun and for measurement work.

Interesting

This is a recycled legacy number. AS numbers in the 10,000s were handed out in the late 1990s, but ARIN records show 10779 registered to its current holder in 2023, so the low number carries none of the history it appears to. PeeringDB self-classifies the network as Educational/Research; that is the operator's own label, and the routing is small enough that it neither confirms nor contradicts it.