AS9896 DAVIDROBB-AS-AP David Robb

AS9896 (DAVIDROBB-AS-AP) is registered to David Robb, an individual in Auckland, New Zealand. One of the two blocks it announces, 202.49.252.0/22, carries the APNIC netname DAVIDROBB-NZ with status ALLOCATED PORTABLE. This is an early, individually-held New Zealand allocation rather than a company network, and it should be read as such.

What it's used for

RIS sees 2 IPv4 prefixes carrying 2,048 addresses — 202.37.60.0/22 and 202.49.252.0/22 — no IPv6, and 1 observed BGP neighbour. A single upstream and two /22s is the smallest kind of independently routed network there is. Reverse DNS on the sampled addresses points into old New Zealand ISP territory: one resolves as 202-49-252-5.paradise.gen.nz, and another as small.dogs.in.a.blender.make.lots.of.noise.net.nz — a hand-written joke PTR of a sort you only find on space that has been administered by a person rather than by a provisioning system. Taken together the evidence describes long-lived legacy address space, still routed, still delegated, but not obviously fronting a commercial service.

Notable

• APNIC's early allocation policies handed portable address space directly to individuals and small operators, and a handful of those registrations survive to this day. This is one of them.
• Because the registrant is a person and the address space is portable, blocks like this are exactly the kind that get sublet, transferred or repurposed. Nothing in the routing evidence proves that is happening here, but the ownership shape is worth knowing when reasoning about addresses in this range.
• Do not infer an organisation from this AS. There is no company behind the handle.