AS842

AS842 is a dormant, never-routed legacy autonomous system registered to Canadian Research Network under ARIN, announcing zero IPv4 and zero IPv6 prefixes as of August 2026. Every routing source checked — RIPEstat, CAIDA AS Rank, Hurricane Electric, and bgp.tools — independently agrees it carries no live BGP announcements, no peers, and no upstreams.

ARIN's RDAP record represents AS842 inside a single shared autnum object spanning AS838 through AS842, with the object's own handle listed as "AS838" rather than "AS842." This is a standard artifact of old bulk AS-number delegations, not a data error — the four sibling numbers (AS838, AS839, AS840, AS841) share the identical registrant and registry record.

No registration date exists on file for AS842. The autnum's only top-level RDAP event is a "last changed" touch dated 2003-07-14; two independent live fetches confirmed no "registration" event action is present anywhere in the object, on the autnum or on any nested entity. A third-party tool, bgp.tools, displays 1970-01-01 for this ASN, which is a Unix-epoch null placeholder rather than a genuine date and should not be read as one.

The registrant, Canadian Research Network (ARIN handle CRN-6), is based in Toronto and plausibly traces to Canada's CA*net II-era national research-and-education network, per secondary sources including Wikipedia. CANARIE Inc. is sometimes assumed to be a direct successor, but canarie.ca never mentions CA*net, CA*net II, or this ASN anywhere on its site, so that identity link is not asserted here. No live operator website was found; the registered NOC domain, canet.ca, fails to resolve.

CAIDA ranks AS842 at 79,459 globally out of all observed ASNs, with a singleton customer cone consisting only of itself and zero prefixes. RPKI validation does not apply, since there is nothing announced to validate.

Operator

Canadian Research Network (ARIN org handle CRN-6; registrant of the shared AS838–AS842 block), Toronto, ON [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum/entity

Country / RIR

CA, ARIN [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP, CAIDA AS Rank

Allocated

Unknown — the autnum's top-level RDAP events[] carries no "registration" event, only a 2003-07-14 "last changed" touch; absence confirmed via two independent live RDAP fetches [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum top-level events

Org status

ARIN registry status "active" (registration good standing, not an operational-activity signal); dormancy corroborated independently by zero announced prefixes, sole POC unvalidated by ARIN since 2010-06-09, NOC domain failing DNS resolution, and no PeeringDB record [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP

Contacts

noc@canet.ca (CA-NOC-ARIN, kind:group, org "Bell Global Network Operations"); ARIN flags this POC unvalidated since 2010-06-09 [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP entity, RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-08-08; Spamhaus, Talos Intelligence, and AbuseIPDB lookups returned HTTP 403 (coverage gaps, not confirmed-clean); NANOG/mail-archive.com archives show no AS842-specific hits [Confirmed re: searches performed; Likely re: overall clean characterization] — check.spamhaus.org, talosintelligence.com, marc.info NANOG archive

Network & routing

Network type

legacy Canadian academic/research-education ASN numbering (CA*net II generation); not a commercial ISP or transit provider [Likely] — ARIN RDAP registrant name/address, Wikipedia CANARIE article

Size

dormant — 0 IPv4 prefixes / 0 addresses, 0 IPv6 prefixes; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses [Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status/announced-prefixes, CAIDA AS Rank, bgp.he.net, bgp.tools (2026-08)

Routing/peering

NOT announced — 0 of 327 RIS peers seeing v4, 0 of 322 seeing v6; CAIDA degree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0); no upstreams, peers, or IX memberships in any source [Confirmed]. No published peering policy — NOC domain unreachable, no PeeringDB net record, no peering page on the historically-related CANARIE site

[Confirmed] — PeeringDB, canarie.ca/network/peering/

RPKI

not assessable — AS842 announces no prefixes, so there is nothing to validate [Confirmed] — RIPEstat announced-prefixes

Notable usage

historically part of Canada's CA*net II-era national research/education network numbering (secondary-sourced, not operator-confirmed); zero announced prefixes today [Likely] — Wikipedia CANARIE article

Related ASNs

AS838, AS839, AS840, AS841 — registry siblings sharing the identical ARIN block record and registrant [Confirmed] — ARIN RDAP autnum/842

Analyst note

AS842 sits inside a single shared ARIN autnum record spanning AS838–AS842 (object handle "AS838") — a normal artifact of old bulk delegations, not a data error. A plausible CA*net → CANARIE succession appears in secondary sources, but CANARIE's own site never names CA*net, CA*net II, or this ASN, so that link is not asserted.