AS255

AS255 is a legacy autonomous system number registered under ARIN to Air Force Systems Networking, a U.S. Department of Defense / U.S. Air Force entity, with the registry name tag PAFB-GW — pointing to a gateway historically associated with Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. It is one of the earliest ASN allocations in existence: ARIN's autnum top-level registration event dates to 1988-11-28, predating the commercial Internet. The registrant organization (ARIN handle 7ESG) lists an address at 501 East Moore Drive, Building 884, Room 1100, Gunther Annex, Maxwell AFB, AL 36114, and the abuse/administrative point of contact is DISA-Columbus (handle REGIS10-ARIN, disa.columbus.ns.mbx.arin-registrations@mail.mil), the Defense Information Systems Agency office in Columbus, Ohio. The key triage point for AS255 is that, while the ARIN registry status is "active," the ASN is effectively dormant in global routing. Every routing source consulted — RIPEstat, CAIDA AS Rank, and the canonical RDAP/RIPEstat fetch — agrees it announces zero IPv4 and zero IPv6 prefixes, is seen by zero of 327 IPv4 and 324 IPv6 RIS peers, and has a customer cone of one (itself, 0 prefixes, 0 addresses). CAIDA reports seen=false and all BGP degree metrics at zero, with a near-bottom AS rank of 79,459. The last observed routing activity was prefix 129.51.0.0/16 originating from AS255, first seen 2000-08-18 and last seen 2002-08-14 — meaning the AS has been absent from the global table for over two decades. RPKI posture cannot be assessed because there are no active originations and therefore no ROAs. No notable public abuse signal was found as of June 2026 — not in Spamhaus ASN-DROP, CleanTalk, AbuseIPDB, or NANOG archives — consistent with a clean, dormant ASN held by a U.S. military operator.

Operator

Air Force Systems Networking (ARIN org handle 7ESG); ASN name tag PAFB-GW (Patrick AFB gateway); admin/abuse contact DISA-Columbus (handle REGIS10-ARIN) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum, whois.arin.net/rest/asn/AS255

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP; RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder (authoritative_rir: arin)

Allocated

1988-11-28 (ARIN registry date from the autnum top-level registration event, NOT an IEEE date — IEEE publishes no ASN registration dates); last changed 2008-08-20 [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum top-level events

Org status

U.S. Federal Government — Department of Defense / U.S. Air Force; registrant Air Force Systems Networking, Maxwell AFB, AL; admin contact DISA-Columbus, 300 North James Road, Whitehall, OH 43213, +1-844-347-2457 ext 2 [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP

Website

af.mil (U.S. Air Force primary domain); no dedicated operator-specific site for PAFB-GW was found [Likely] — ipinfo.io/AS255

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-06-20 — not on Spamhaus ASN-DROP (asndrop.json, published 2026-05-29), CleanTalk, AbuseIPDB, or in NANOG archives; a dormant DoD ASN with no live prefixes presents no abuse surface

Network & routing

Network type

U.S. Government / Military — Department of Defense / U.S. Air Force network; legacy/inactive (0 prefixes announced) [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP, bgp.he.net/AS255, ipinfo.io/AS255

Size

dormant — 0 IPv4 prefixes / 0 IPv4 addresses and 0 IPv6 prefixes; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses [Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status / CAIDA AS Rank (2026-06)

Routing/peering

NOT announced — 0 RIS peers seeing it (0/327 v4, 0/324 v6); CAIDA degree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0); no upstreams or peers visible in any source [Confirmed]. No PeeringDB record (404), so no public peering policy exists [Confirmed]

RPKI

not assessable — AS255 announces no prefixes, so there are no ROAs to validate; RPKI validation skipped (no prefix supplied) [Confirmed]

Notable usage

name tag PAFB-GW indicates an early gateway for Patrick Air Force Base, FL; one of the earliest ASN allocations (1988). Last known routing was 129.51.0.0/16 originated by AS255, first seen 2000-08-18, last seen 2002-08-14; withdrawn from global routing since

[Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status, bgp.he.net/AS255

Analyst note

Encountered as a dormant legacy ASN registered to a U.S. military entity. ARIN status is "active," but live routing has been absent for over two decades (last seen 2002). Clean, inactive ASN. Note: a community-research angle suggested AS255 is a reserved/documentation ASN per RFC 3915 — that is incorrect (RFC 3915 governs domain registration grace periods, not ASNs); AS255 is a real ARIN allocation and that claim was excluded.