AS7761 AS-350E

Autonomous System 7761 (AS-350E) belongs to Morningstar, Inc., the

Chicago-based investment-research and financial-data company.

What it's used for

• Carrying part of Morningstar's own corporate and market-data infrastructure. It announces a single /24, 206.220.16.0/24, registered under the netname LIM-NET.
• LIM is Logical Information Machines, a Chicago commodities and energy data-analytics firm that Morningstar acquired in 2009; the block and the ASN now sit under the Morningstar organisation. The network is used for data delivery and internal systems rather than for anything sold as connectivity.

Notable

• This is an enterprise AS with a deliberately minimal footprint: 256 IPv4 addresses, one prefix. As with many financial-data firms, the point of holding an ASN is provider independence and multihoming, not address volume.
• The AS-350E handle is opaque and tells you nothing about the holder — one more reminder that ASN handles are free-form strings chosen by whoever registered them, and are not a reliable identifier.

Interesting

• Market-data and research firms cluster their networks around Chicago's financial infrastructure, and Morningstar's absorbed LIM network is a small piece of that ecosystem — the visible remnant, in the routing table, of a company that no longer exists as an independent brand.