AS8419 HOTCHILLI

HOTCHILLI is held today by Redcentric Solutions Ltd, a UK managed service

provider selling network, cloud and IT services to businesses and public-sector

bodies. The handle is a fossil of Hotchilli Internet, the ISP whose network this

originally was; Redcentric's main autonomous system is a different one.

What it's used for

• Business connectivity and hosted services for Redcentric's customers. The reverse DNS names the acquired brands rather than the parent: hosts resolve under hotchilli.net (including its RADIUS and back-office machines), dxi-static-NNN-NN.dxi.net on static customer assignments, and access pools under virtelco.com.
• Roughly 49,000 IPv4 addresses across five prefixes, plus a /32 of IPv6.

Notable

• A handle that outlived its holder. Reading the AS name gives you a defunct consumer-ish ISP brand; the operator is an enterprise MSP, and the space is business and managed-service address space, not eyeball broadband.
• Large parts of the range have no reverse DNS at all, and some carries literal no-dns-yet placeholder names, which suggests assignments handed out and never fully populated.
• The AS is essentially single-homed and sits behind Redcentric's main network, which is where the group's transit and peering actually live.

Interesting

• Three separate ISP brands survive in the reverse DNS of one AS. Each acquisition left its naming behind, so the rDNS is a clearer record of UK ISP consolidation than any of the company registries are.