On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, John Fraizer wrote:
On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Bill Nickless wrote:
The question seems (in my opinion) to be whether registries are delegating netblocks that can be further subdivided, or not.
That is, some ISPs hold that if a registry has allocated /16s in some space, those allocations should not be subdivided by the allocatees. If a registry is allocating /19s minimum in some other space, then the allocatees cannot and should not split that space and advertise longer prefixes.
All of this talk has me wondering about our network. It's much smaller than most of yours and according to the CIDR report, the only thing it says we should aggregate is a single /24 out of the /19. It is being announced for testing purposes and by the end of the week, the testing will be over and it will no longer be announced.
My question however is along the lines of splitting the /19 up by swipping it out to BGP speaking customers who are announcing /24's, /23's, /22's, etc. The announcement needs to be made by them (from my understanding -- which may be wrong) for their multi-homing diversity to work.
If I add an aggregate statement to our config, is it going to aggregate those /24's, etc that our BGP speaking clients are announcing to us into our main /19 announcement?
This is something that I've been thinking about for a while and want to sure we're doing the technically sound thing.
There are two kinds of aggregates. Regular, normal aggregates, and summary aggregates. Normal aggregates are announced in addition to any smaller blocks that make up the aggregate. At least one smaller block inside the aggregate is required to be present for the announcing router to announce the aggregate (i.e. an activating route). Summary aggregates work in a similar manner, but they surpress all advertisement of routes that are included within the aggregate - they are subsumed. Both types of aggregates should flag routes with the Atomic Aggregate attribute, to indicate that there is the possibility of some routing information having been lost. Be VERY careful with summary aggregates - if a customer is sending prepends, you will lose that information at your border to your peers and upstreams. Customers don't like that. It is possibly to selective surpress subordinate routes belonging to an aggregate on some router platforms.
In practice, how have corporate divestitures been handled by the registries? Have organizations with portable netblocks been able to split them up and get new allocations from the registries, following the corporate reorganizations?
It is my understanding (again, perhaps flawed) that legacy allocations were settlement-free but, if an organization has say a legacy B, is only using a /18 of it and wants to do the right thing and return the B in exchange for an /18 in CIDR space, they now get to pay for the /18 just because they wanted to do the right thing. I know if we had legacy space we'd hang on to it for financial reasons if none other.
If this were a just and sensible world, we would allow IP addresses to be treated like property. Folks with big, wasted, /8s could sell them to those who could or would use them. Because it would cost money to sit on unused space, no one would. We would get much better utilization. Considering the relativly large number of IPv4 addresses in play, the price would be reasonable, especially once folks sold their legacy space off.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.
--- John Fraizer EnterZone, Inc
Daniel Golding NetRail,Inc. "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness"