On 2008-12-19, at 00:27, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Even if a longer prefix like a /24 is announced, chances of people accepting it is slim. Especially, as you say, if the RIR allocation is something larger than /24
I think in practice that's over-stating the problem. If an RIR assigns you a /22, the chances are good it has been assigned from some larger block which is also used to assign longer prefixes, down to whatever the RIR's minimum is (e.g. /24 under common critical infrastructure policies). While it's possible to imagine someone re-parsing a full set of all RIR data every day and rolling out martian filters to all border routers based on precisely what assignments have been made, that someone would incur that operational cost in the face of what is a fairly slim benefit seems unlikely. More likely that someone would filter based on the longest assignment made in a particular /8 (e.g. in 202/7, 199/8 we might expect to see / 24s, in 76/8 not so much, etc). Even more likely than that is that people might filter out obvious RFC3330-style martians and permit everything else up to a /24.
And I have a feeling acceptance /24 route announcements of anything other than legacy classful space, infrastructure space like the root servers is going to be patchy at best.
We're both speculating, of course. It'd be nice if some grad student somewhere with friends in the operations community was to experiment with /24s carved out of larger blocks from all over the planet and present some empirical data. Joe