AS14328 RRD

A commercial printer announcing sixteen scattered fragments of a single large block it holds outright.

What it's used for

• A printing and communications company's network. 6,656 addresses across 17 IPv4 prefixes, with eight observed BGP neighbours and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• Sixteen of the announcements fall inside 162.27, and all of those carry the netname RRD.
• 50.58.16.0/23 carries the netname 50-58-16-0-23 and is the only block registered under the spelling R.R. Donnelley and Sons, Co.; the rest read R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Holding a large contiguous block and announcing sixteen small pieces of it, rather than the whole thing, means the parts are in different places. A company with plants across a continent gets its addresses once and then distributes them site by site, and the routing table is the only public record of where those sites are.
• The two spellings of the company name are the same organisation filed twice, years apart, by people using different house styles. Registry records preserve every one of those decisions.
• Nothing answers a reverse lookup across eighteen sampled addresses. For a manufacturer whose network connects presses and prepress systems rather than public servers, there is nothing a name would help with.
• Eight neighbours for a network this size is a business that treats connectivity as a supply chain: more than one vendor, no single point of failure, and no interest in being a network itself.