Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 08:59:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Dave Temkin <dave@ordinaryworld.com> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Is this really an issue? So long as they're not advertising the space I see no issue with routing traffic through a 10. network as transit. If you have no reason to reach their router directly (and after Cisco's last exploit, I'd think no one would want anyone to reach their router directly :-) ), what's the harm done?
RFC1918 merely states that it shouldn't be routed on the global internet, not that it can't be used for transit space.
That's not what is in my copy of 1918. "In order to use private address space, an enterprise needs to determine which hosts do not need to have network layer connectivity outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future and thus could be classified as private. Such hosts will use the private address space defined above. Private hosts can communicate with all other hosts inside the enterprise, both public and private. However, they cannot have IP connectivity to any host outside of the enterprise. While not having external (outside of the enterprise) IP connectivity private hosts can still have access to external services via mediating gateways (e.g., application layer gateways)." As I read this, packets with a source address in 19298 space should NEVER appear outside the enterprise. Comcast and many others seem to blithely ignore this for convenience sake. (It's not like they need a huge amount of space to give private addresses to these links.) -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634