AS8324 URC-AS

URC-AS is South Ural State University (ЮУрГУ) in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The

handle comes from the university's Ural Regional Centre for computing and networking,

which historically supplied connectivity to the region's academic institutions.

What it's used for

• Campus connectivity for the university: faculties, laboratories, student facilities and the institution's own servers. Announced space is small, roughly 6k addresses across two prefixes.
• Router and infrastructure reverse DNS resolves under urc.ac.ru, the .ac.ru academic domain, confirming the network as an academic one rather than a commercial ISP.
• The AS is a stub with only a couple of BGP neighbours, so it is an end-site network, not a regional transit provider.

Notable

• University address space. Addresses in these ranges belong to the campus and to connected academic units. There is no subscriber broadband and no hosting business.
• South Ural State University is one of Russia's larger technical universities and a designated national research university, which is why the network also serves research computing rather than just administrative IT.

Interesting

• The URC handle outlived the entity it names: regional academic network centres like this one were, in the 1990s, often the only route to the internet for every institution in their oblast. The AS number's position in the low 8300s dates from that period of Russian academic networking.