Tracking Down the Arpanet

its still alive on admiralty way

[grelmar]

I actually posted this in "domain names" first, a week or so ago, and got zippo for response, so I thought I'd post it here and see if it caught someone's interest.

A little while ago, my site got a hit off a domain that resolved to .arpa TLD, which at the time I thought was weird, because from what I knew, arpanet was officially decommisioned sometime around 1990.

At first, I thought it was a glitch in the look-up, a server hiccup on my end, but not wanting to let it go, I did a bit of poking around and found the following at iana dot org:

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), in cooperation with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is currently responsible for managing the Top Level Domain (TLD) name "arpa". This arrangement is documented in Appendix A. This domain name provides the root of the name hierarchy of the reverse mapping of IP addresses to domain names. More generally, this domain name undertakes a role as a limited use domain for Internet infrastructure applications, by providing a name root for the mapping of particular protocol values to names of service entities. This domain name provides a name root for the mapping of protocol values into lookup keys to retrieve operationally critical protocol infrastructure data records or objects for the Internet.

Which I found rather vague. The tech support address for arpa TLD is in Marina Del Ray, on Admiralty Way, which strikes me as an address on a navy base (just by the sound of it).

Does anyone here know what's up with arpanet, and why it would be scanning sites? Its not a case of paranoia or anything, I have every confidence that the US gov't scans pretty much everything on the net at some point or another (and I don't blame them for it either, strikes me a simple and effective way to do some data-mining, and lord knows, they have the machines with the horsepower to do it). I'm just curious why they would keep the anachronism of arpanet alive.

[Macguru]

Hi grelmar,

I BELIEVE the ARPAnet thingies we can see on some older versions of ANALOG reports, are REAL. Here a good bumper sticker :

It's as BAD as you think, and they ARE out to get you!

[mbauser2]

Argh. Misinformation, incorrect assumptions, and paranoia. Just the things to put me in a bad mood.

The really weird thing, grelmar, is that you've quoted the document (RFC 3172 [rfc-editor.org]) that explains exactly what .arpa is used for. <snip>

.arpa is used for reverse-lookups: translating non-domain-name addresses (like IP numbers and Enum resources) into domain names. If it's showing up in your server log, it usually means that somebody accessed your site from a domain that has a misconfigured domain name server. It's nothing at all to worry about.

[edited by: lawman at 11:55 am (utc) on April 1, 2004]

[bird]

The .arpa toplevel domain (more accurately, its in-addr.arpa subdomain) is used for reverse lookup of domain names. You can do a reverse lookup by using a type=any request, and appending the in-addr.arpa subdomain to the IP address written in reverse order. Alternatively, you can use a type=ptr request on the IP address alone:

$> nslookup
> example.com
Non-authoritative answer:
example.com nameserver = a.iana-servers.net
example.com nameserver = b.iana-servers.net
example.com internet address = 192.0.34.166
> set type=any
> 166.34.0.192.in-addr.arpa
Non-authoritative answer:
166.34.0.192.in-addr.arpa name = www.example.com
> set type=ptr
> 192.0.34.166
Non-authoritative answer:
166.34.0.192.in-addr.arpa name = www.example.com
>

[grelmar]

ahhhhh.... its all so clear to me now.

Ok, I figured there was as simple, non-paranoia inducing explanation for it all. Thanks for the info.

Given that I've got way more hits from dot-gov and dot-mil TLDs than dot-arpa, I didn't really think there was anything hinky.

[richlowe]

Ah, I miss the good old day of the APRANET, VAXes (real computers, not these toys we have today), gopher, veronica, ftp and so on. Sigh. Those were the days...

Richard Lowe