AS10930 NOVA-INTERNET

NOVA-INTERNET is Nova Internet Services, Inc., a small independent provider registered in Dallas, Texas, selling business Internet access along with web hosting, dedicated servers and colocation. Its address space was allocated in the late 1990s and it has been announcing essentially the same six /24s ever since.

What it's used for

RIS sees 6 IPv4 prefixes / 1,536 addresses — the contiguous run 209.251.224.0/24 through 209.251.229.0/24 — no IPv6, and 2 observed neighbours. The reverse DNS is where the current use shows through. Most of the sampled addresses answer with the provider's own generic pattern (5.225.251.209.nova-net.net), but the ones that have been customised are servers, not subscribers: seavoyage.com, mail.betadesigns.com, mail.tbfaa.org. Third-party web and mail hosts sitting on the provider's space is the reverse-DNS signature of hosting and colocation.

Notable

Six /24s announced individually rather than as one /22 and two /24s is the default behaviour of an operator who never revisited its BGP config after the blocks arrived. It is harmless at this scale, and it is a good marker of a long-lived, low-churn network.

Interesting

The name is a collision hazard. There are unrelated "Nova" networks — a Spanish ISP, a cable operator in Illinois — and none of them is this one. The evidence that pins it down is first-party: the nova-net.net reverse DNS on its own blocks. Self-registered contiguous space wearing the holder's own rDNS is what separates a real, if small, operator from the scattered, PTR-less shape of an address broker.