Earlier today I thought I had a URL in my clipboard, but I actually had four 9 digit integers copied from a spreadsheet, which were identification numbers from a proprietary system. Completely unrelated to the task at hand. I pasted it into Firefox and was surprised to find that it actually loaded a page. I've seen dotless decimal notations of IPv4 addresses before, but this long number is something much, much larger.
714687644714805209715128610715964400 (stick a HTTP:// in front)
How does this work? All of the decimal -> IPv4 converters that I've found on the Internet all consider it an invalid input. If I take the IPv4 address that it actually loads, and perform the same calculations to convert it to dotless decimal, I get a vastly smaller number.
I've read that ping can accept dwords and do some conversion, but it cannot convert this number to an IP address. IPv6 is out of the question as this host does not have IPv6 connectivity.
What kind of madness is this? It's stumped myself and my coworkers.
Edit: It's back online now.