AS15854 HP_WEBSERVICES

Nearly four hundred thousand addresses behind one observed neighbour, under a handle naming a company that sold this business twice ago.

What it's used for

• An outsourcing provider's network, carrying its customers' address space. Thirty-seven IPv4 prefixes announced from Germany, no IPv6, three hundred and ninety-one thousand four hundred and twenty-four addresses, through a single observed BGP neighbour.

Notable

• The AS handle is a two-letter brand, an underscore, and a word for web services. The name string is a later owner's three-letter brand, an underscore, the word for a customer, and the operating company.
• Both fields use an underscore, which is legal here and illegal in a hostname.
• Several blocks carry a steel and industrial group's name with a two-digit suffix, and are registered to that group rather than to the announcing company.
• One block's netname is another autonomous system number with a suffix for the protocol version.
• One is the single-word name of a chemical company that was broken up in the nineteen-nineties, held now by the outsourcing provider.
• Contacts include several internal department codes and one that runs a brand into a personal-sounding suffix without a space.
• One block's registry lookup failed. Eighteen addresses were queried and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Outsourcing means the customer's addresses stay the customer's and the routing becomes the provider's, so this record is a list of who signed contracts and when. The names date the deals better than the dates do.