I was curious to know how much IPv4 address space Facebook actually has. I assumed that they run a large server cluster on their own, but you can’t be too sure.

So I ran a whois on Facebook’s frontend IPv4 address for www.facebook.com:

OrgName:    Thefacebook.com
OrgID:      THEFA-3
Address:    156 University Ave, 3rd floor
City:       Palo Alto
StateProv:  CA
PostalCode: 94301
Country:    US

NetRange:   69.63.176.0 – 69.63.191.255
CIDR:       69.63.176.0/20
NetName:    TFBNET2
NetHandle:  NET-69-63-176-0-1
Parent:     NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Assignment
NameServer: DNS1.SCTM.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS2.SCTM.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS04.SF2P.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS05.SF2P.TFBNW.NET
[...]
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-11-23 19:10

I then ran a scan of their entire IPv4 address block, 4096 IPv4 address in total, and only 421 are used. Even if you subtract 16 IPv4 address for the necessary broadcast addresses, then that’s still a pretty low usage percentage (421/4080 is about 10%).

I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised, most companies are like this. They grab up quite a few blocks and then blame other people for the lack of IPv4 addresses.  Although IANA did reserve quite a few addresses for internal networks (about 18 million) and multicast addresses (about 16 million which don’t even route properly most of the time). That still leaves 4, 260, 967, 296 addresses though (2^32 – 34 million). Enough for much of the developed world. Well whatever happens, I just hope the transition over to IPv6 makes public Internet Protocol addresses available to more people in the digital industries. Heck 2^128 addresses is more than enough for everyone to have quite a few of their own IPv6 addresses. The only problem with that though is the routability issues caused by dividing up the public Internet into so many pieces.

The interesting thing that I found out from running a scan of Facebook’s IPv4 block is that they created a group debt tracker application called MoochSpot.