AS16298 INTERBOX-AS InterBox Internet

One hundred and fourteen neighbours on five thousand addresses, and one address answers as a publisher's website.

What it's used for

• A provider's network. Three prefixes announced from the Netherlands, one of them IPv6, five thousand one hundred and twenty addresses, through one hundred and fourteen observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• Both IPv4 blocks use a country code, the service brand, and a full date. The two dates are sixteen years apart, and the newer block adds an operations role ahead of the company.
• Three of six queried addresses answered, and all three are different in kind. One is two letters, then the third and fourth octets zero-padded to three digits each, on an unrelated domain.
• The second changes those two letters, keeps the padded octets, and sits on a carrier's name nested beneath the service brand's own domain, so two companies share one name.
• The third is a customer's website: the usual three letters for the web and a publisher's domain, which means one address in the sample is a hosted site rather than a piece of network.
• The AS handle is the brand, the letters for an autonomous system, then the brand again with the word for the service.

Interesting

• More than a hundred neighbours on a network this size is the signature of an exchange-heavy operator. The addresses are almost incidental; the value is in the number of places it can hand traffic over.
• Zero-padding octets to three digits makes hostnames sort correctly as text, which matters to whoever reads the zone file and to nobody else.