AS12925 SINP-MSU

A nuclear physics institute whose one reverse name gives the room number.

What it's used for

• The network of a nuclear physics research institute within a Moscow university. 7,936 addresses across seven IPv4 prefixes, a single observed BGP neighbour, and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• Six of the seven blocks share the netname RU-SINPMSU-20000106, all registered on the same day.
• The seventh is SINP-HEP-NSRD, named for a research group rather than the institution.
• The registrant name runs to eleven words before reaching the university's name.
• The registry lookup for 213.131.6.0/24 failed, so nothing here describes that block's record.
• One of eighteen sampled addresses returned a name: LKVE-307-SW2-VL120.rm.sinp.msu.ru.

Interesting

• That one hostname is a physical location. It reads as a building code, room 307, switch 2, VLAN 120, under a subdomain for rooms. Campus networks name equipment by where you would walk to find it, because whoever reads the name is often about to do exactly that. Commercial networks almost never do this, since their addresses are meant to be portable and a room number is the opposite of portable.
• Seven blocks all registered on one day in January 2000, split into a /20, a /21, two /23s and three /24s. A single allocation carved into pieces sized for departments, which is the shape research networks take when address space is divided by organisational chart rather than by traffic.
• HEP-NSRD names a research group inside the institute. Netnames are one of the few public places where an organisation's internal divisions are written down by people not thinking about an audience.