AS9893 DSE-VIC-GOV-AS Cenitex

AS9893 (DSE-VIC-GOV-AS) is held by Cenitex, the State of Victoria's shared ICT services provider. Cenitex was created by the Victorian Government in 2008 and supplies cloud, network, security and workplace computing services to Victorian government departments and agencies. This is a government network, and the AS handle is a fossil: DSE names a Victorian department that no longer exists in that form, while the current holder is the whole-of-government service organisation.

What it's used for

RIS sees 24 IPv4 prefixes carrying 77,056 addresses, no IPv6, and only 1 observed BGP neighbour. A single upstream on a network of that size is the signature of a captive institutional network: it consumes connectivity and provides none. The address count is dominated by the legacy 157.128.0.0/16, supported by 165.142.240.0/20 and a long tail of /24s spread across 203.x, 202.69.x and 192.189.x — space accreted by different Victorian departments over decades and now announced from one place. Reverse DNS bears that out: sampled addresses resolve under justice.vic.gov.au, meaning the block is carrying a Victorian government department's hosts even though the department is not the AS holder.

Notable

• This is a clean illustration of why registry handles are not evidence of current use. The handle says one department, the holder record says Cenitex, and the reverse DNS says the Department of Justice. All three are true at different layers.
• Consolidating many agencies' address space behind one shared-services AS is a deliberate pattern in Australian state government; a hit in this AS tells you "Victorian public sector" but not which agency.
• No IPv6 appears in the global table for this AS.