AS8985 MSK-IX_SERVICES

MSK-IX_Services is held by the joint-stock company that operates MSK-IX, the Moscow Internet Exchange and by far the largest IXP in Russia.

What it's used for

• Internet-exchange and shared-infrastructure services rather than a customer network. Reverse DNS across the announced prefixes resolves into msk-ix.ru / msk-ix.net router and management names (for example m9p-mr2.msk-ix.ru and khouse-mr2.msk-ix.net, naming the M9 and Kurchatov-house facilities).
• Parts of the space carry adjacent Russian internet-infrastructure services: ripn.net hosts belonging to the Russian Institute for Public Networks, which historically administered the exchange, plus registry-adjacent and CERT hosts.
• It peers with a large number of networks, as an exchange operator would.

Notable

• This AS has no honest commercial kind. It is exchange-point and shared-infrastructure address space, not hosting, transit or eyeball space. Its prefixes should not be classified or geolocated as a service-provider network.
• Some of the inventory sits in old Russian academic and public-network ranges (193.232.x, 194.226.x, 195.208.x), a reminder that the exchange grew out of the mid-1990s RIPN-administered peering arrangement between the first Russian ISPs.

Interesting

• IXP peering-LAN space is deliberately not meant to be reached from the wider internet, so an address in this AS says almost nothing about who is using it.