Ask HN: How can individuals or small businesses acquire IP addresses?
Due to IPv4 address exhaustion and the IPv6 lack of adoption, the days of owning your own IP address range seem long gone...
It's no longer feasible for individuals or small businesses to purchase their own ranges, mainly because of the high cost, barrier to entry, responsibilities, etc.
Do any solutions exist that allow you to purchase small numbers of IP addresses for your own permanent use?
I understand that due to limitations in BGP, you can't announce a single IP address to a different location than the rest of the range. However, could there be an overlay protocol or service that allows this to happen?
Renting IPs from hosting services like Linode or AWS doesn't count, as they are locked-in to the hosting provider and you don't own them directly.
Any suggestions?
15 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] threadThis is totally normal for an SME who might buy business FTTC or a lease-line with 5 static IPv4 addresses included. Then you would set up one for incoming mail, one for internet access, one for a site to site VPN etc. That sort of thing. What use case do you have for owning an IP address separately from your ISP?
The limitation you point out is not actually in BGP but is, instead, a matter of convention: ISPs will, generally, accept prefixes longer (smaller) than /24 but will not advertise them to other ISPs, in turn. This convention arose out of the need to mitigate the steady increase of core routing table size--as did CIDR, itself, and VLSM before it.
While not ideal, most organizations use DNS for failover of individual, redundant hosts from one address to another. Of course, you may find this unsuitable for your use case, but if the users of your host's service are "the Internet," then the only alternative is to mediate how those users access the host, either by inserting a proxy or creating redundant connections with a custom client on the host.
If you can provide more detail regarding your specific requirements, I may be able to elaborate further, more bespoke alternatives.
I'm interested in having my own IPs mainly so that I can move servers wherever I want and take the IPs with me. CNAMEs can only go so far when it comes to moving things around without interruption.
It's only a small personal operation though - and I am aware that limitations with hosting providers and ISPs may prevent me from being able to point my own IPs to them.
A tunnel with private routers between two cloud providers would allow you to advertise private host routes (/32) inside your network while NAT-ing appropriately to the outside. This achieves manual failover (or fast migration), but it can be expanded for dynamic failover, as well.
Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate the above solution. Otherwise, good luck with whatever solution you choose.
More info: https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/become-a-mem...
I believe you will still need to be able to justify the need for the address space to complete the transfer. "Justifying" a /24 should not be difficult.
(I've owned a /24 since the early 90's...)
Or with azure?
Last I checked, Azure didn't let you do external BGP announcements but I may be wrong...
If you want to "own" a few addresses to play with, it is not technically possible. If you want a small block, you should just get a VPS that supports multiple IPs and tunnel them back to your location.
In every recent case I've seen (over the last six years), no broker has had ranges larger than /24 for reassignment. Of course, you can do with just a /24, but the justification process has also grown somewhat more stringent, as a pure traffic engineering justification ("We need BGP; here is why.") is no longer enough, in my experience.
http://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Requesting_a_block
Note, this is not for permanent use. From the above link: "You also must login every 3-6 months even if it's just to check in to keep your block active, you've been warned!"