AS16205 DSINET-ASN

Six blocks named for one company, four named for others, and a reverse zone that contains the word reverse.

What it's used for

• A regional provider's network. Twelve prefixes announced from Germany, sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty-four addresses, through one hundred and eighteen observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Six blocks share one scheme: a country code, a short form of the company name, and a full date written as year, month and day with no separators. The dates span eleven years.
• The remaining four blocks are registered to other organisations entirely, and their netnames say so: an association for privately operated data communication, a technology centre named for its city, and a software holding company.
• Every block the provider holds itself lists a network operations centre as its first contact, ahead of the company.
• All eighteen queried addresses answered. Seventeen are the address written with hyphens, then the word static, then the word reverse, then the domain.
• The eighteenth is a router: an interface abbreviation, a switch label with a number, and two letters for a city.

Interesting

• Putting the word reverse inside a reverse name is redundant, but it makes the zone unmistakable in a traceroute, where the reader has only the string to work from.
• More than a hundred neighbours on sixteen thousand addresses is a peering-heavy shape. A network this size that talks to that many others is buying reach through exchanges rather than transit.
• Carrying customer blocks under their own netnames keeps each registration intact through however many providers the customer moves between.