It’s nice to see the DoD has the same IPs as back when the ARPAnet was a big thing [I was skimming over the March, 1984 edition of 2600 Magazine.] There’s some interesting things surrounding these IPs, too
Exhibit A: Map of the Internet @ xkcd, the 26.0.0.0/8 IP range is owned by DISA
Exhibit B: host www.disa.mil â�� 131.84.1.168 which is also related to the DoD as this class C is owned by them; see this AoH article [search for 131.84.1 in the page.] Also, host dod.mil â�� 131.84.1.63 so there’s an obvious connection, indicated at by two sources.
Exhibit C: Target -
IP, host name, host type, operating system [here's some info on 1995 TAC-4.] This is advertised as a Pentagon access/entry point.
Pinging from a number of different hosts [sitting on separate IP ranges] yields something of the following sort:
inferno:~$ ping -c10 26.0.0.26
PING 26.0.0.26 (26.0.0.26): 56 data bytes
36 bytes from nw*.*.telus.com (208.181.*.*): Destination Host Unreachable
Vr HL TOS Len ID Flg off TTL Pro cks Src Dst
4 5 00 0054 5ff8 0 0000 3d 01 427a * 26.0.0.26
--- 26.0.0.26 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Now, what happens can be seen by tracerouting: at some hop or another we get a !H indicator, meaning the Host is Unreacheable [in fact, that there is no known route to the requested hop from that router.] It is quite probable that this particular host [26.0.0.26] is decomissioned but I feel there must be quite a few IPs in this class A that are still used. Another very likely possibility is that access to these hosts is limited to trusted/allowed clients only in an effort to thwart unauthorized access attempts/DoS etc. If that’s the case, think of how easy it is to extend this functionality to general censorship.
At any rate, this was a fun incursion in a bit of ‘net history [for me, at least.] I know a lot of the ARPAnet assignments are still valid today [the curious one can take the xkcd map and analyze it against some of the original range distributions] but I still find it interesting that such old information still has some value today. Plus, the .MIL has, arguably, some of the coolest toys in existence and it makes for interesting speculations [albeit, all in all... speculations :( ] And I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to know more.
