At 09:22 AM 06/10/97 -0500, Phil Howard wrote:
Right. But people see it as such a problem because the routing policies are IP space derived. When people are told they need a /19 to be routable, then they begin to go backwards on solving the IP space problem and resume wasting it (but hiding the waste to look like its used).
But this is somewhat of a misnomer. It is not an issue of being 'routable' v. 'non-routable', but rather, one of whether you can be aggregated into a larger prefix. This practice encourages aggregation -- it is commonly agreed that Aggregation is Good (tm). The routability issue comes into play when: o You are specifically referring to routes being propagated by a service provider who uses prefix-length filters, AND o You cannot be aggregated into a large enough advertised CIDR block to conform to these types of filters.
When the need to justify space usage occurred, along with it came some ideas on actually how to do that. And I see that working. We were projected to run totally out of space by now, and since we have not, I assume it did work pretty well.
BGP4, CIDR, or Die.
But the real problem is routing policies that are encouraging people to go back to wasting space. By using the network size as the criteria for doing route filtering, the smaller guys get screwed and they see their solution as inflating their network. This practice needs to be stopped or a better solution needs to come out of it.
One might suggest that some of the prefix length filter could be replaced by more aggressive dampening policies. - paul