On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 09:52:31PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:
timeframe needed for deployment of software to support 4 byte AS numbers.
I have thought about a proposal, and I guess it's time to make it public. I know of several up-sides and down-sides to this already, but I won't list them for now to stimulate discussion.
There is at least a Internet Draft on the subject now. One could lean on vendor of choice today and ask for them.
Rather than allocate AS numbers as we do today, why not make an AS simply be a globally unique 32 bit number, and establish a convention that AS numbers must come from a customer's netblock? That is, if I'm assigned 10.0.0.0/24, I could pick 10.0.0.1 as my "AS" number (or 10.0.0.37 for that matter) and I just start announcing it.
See early IPv6, ISIS, etc for more on this tactic.
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org