AS11442 NCSU

NCSU is North Carolina State University's autonomous system, announcing the Raleigh campus network. It is a textbook university AS: a few very large legacy blocks, campus-wide reverse DNS, and a single upstream.

What it's used for

RIS shows 4 IPv4 prefixes totalling 197,632 addresses — three /16s (152.1.0.0/16, 152.7.0.0/16, 152.14.0.0/16) plus 204.84.244.0/22 — and one IPv6 prefix, 2605:100::/32. All three /16s are registered in ARIN to North Carolina State University itself (NCSU, NCSU2, NCSU3). Three class-B-sized blocks for one campus is the hallmark of an institution that was allocated space in the era when universities took /16s as a matter of course, and never had reason to give them back.

Reverse DNS confirms the space carries the university's own users and machines: samples resolve to psymet.ced.ncsu.edu, deepexplorer.csc.ncsu.edu and catv-ctrl-iv-1.comtech.ncsu.edu — hosts inside academic departments (the College of Engineering and Design, Computer Science), named per-machine rather than out of a generic pool. That is a campus with globally routable addresses on real workstations and lab systems, which is how these networks were built and, in many places, still are.

Notable

The 204.84.244.0/22 is registered not to NCSU but to MCNC, under the handle NCREN-CIDR3. This is not a third-party leasing signal: MCNC operates NCREN, the North Carolina Research and Education Network, which is NC State's regional research-network provider. Space assigned by an R&E network to a member campus is ordinary provider-assigned addressing.

Interesting

Only one observed neighbour. That single adjacency is NCREN itself: the campus reaches the internet through the state research network rather than by buying commodity transit directly, which is the standard connectivity model for a US public university.