Agreed. And it is my opinion that upstream providers should allow (or be required) portability of assigned IP addresses. Naturally, there are some logistics that need to be dealt with, but if someone is BGP peering, it pretty much boils down to an announcement change, correct? We, as a provider, would not mind paying some nominal fee (cheap!) to our upstream provider for continued use of IP addresses after we have terminated our service. We have even considered getting the smallest possible connection to that particular provider just to be able to continually use their IP addresses. This does not seem like a very effective alternative for us or our upstream provider. I am wondering what impact, if any, would requiring portability of IP addresses under certain criteria (BGP peering, etc) have on the Internet? Talk to ya... Sean
At 06:17 PM 2/25/97 -0700, Chris Phillips wrote:
We service hundreds of dedicated customers and some customers don't mind renumbering (if they are small) but most of our larger customers who have more than 100-200 hosts on their network have expressed GREAT opposition to any such notion of renumbering. Its not that they don't want to do it because they are lazy, on the contrary, many companies cannot the afford the downtime or cost asociated with renumbering their LAN/WAN. I agree that renumbering is an important aspect of address grooming for better agregation but there are some real $$$ costs to some end-user networks to do so. Also, how many times can you ask a customer to renumber before they bail and go elsewhere?
It's been suggested that renumbering is a fact of life; everyone will do it at least once in their lifetime. This is one of the reasons why an entire working group in the IETF has been created to deal with this from an operational perspective. See:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/pier-charter.html
and
http://www.isi.edu:80/div7/pier/
See also RFC2071.
- paul
You're right.
And as soon as the mainstream hardware we all sell to people, and that has significant market penetration in the installed base, makes this reasonable to do for a *large* operation, this will be reasonable.
However, as the state of IPV4 and its hardware sits right now, it is NOT reasonable to do *other than on the boundaries of a customer's individual decision*.
That is, if a PROVIDER changes upstream links, it is unreasonable to expect their *customers* to renumber. To force that paradigm is to attempt to tie an ISP to a given provider. The requirement to renumber comes out of the blue, it is an unanticipated cost, and one which is neither under the control of nor a result of the actions of the customer.
Better go talk to some attorneys before you do things that lead to this result.
If a *customer* changes providers, they bear the costs of their actions. If the operative cause of their renumbering is their decision to leave one ISP and go to another, *they* are directly responsible for their own pain.
THAT is much more likely to pass muster.
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_______________________________________________________________________ Sean Rolinson Systems Administrator snowdog@charm.net Charm Net Inc. Baltimore, DC, N. Va's Access to the Internet (410) 558-3900 Voice (410) 558-3901 Fax email: info@charm.net (410) 558-3300 Data (202) 956-5110 Data login: guest 'no pword' http://www.charm.net/ TIP#2527 Personal http://www.rolinson.org/ _______________________________________________________________________