On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 10:41:09AM -0700, David Conrad wrote:
On 5/6/02 10:20 AM, "Grant A. Kirkwood" <grant@tnarg.org> wrote:
I'm sorry, but ARIN's policy practically _encourages_ the "efficient wasting" of space to qualify for PI space. This is one of the most frustrating things to deal with.
As someone who used to run a registry, one of the most frustrating things to deal with was watching ISPs pee in their own pool and then scream at the registries 'cause the water was yellow.
Just how big should the DFZ be?
Given the Internet is not (yet, at least) a fascist state, the registries rely on ISPs to be aware of the environment in which they are operating. As it is unlikely any of the registries will be hiring independent auditing firms to verify true utilization, there is need for a certain level of trust. If an ISP is too small to justify the allocation of a /20, then they should obtain address space from an upstream provider so that they do not add yet another entry to the DFZ.
A multi-homed ISP who advertises PA space to multiple transit providers adds state to the DFZ. It is common practice for PA-delegating transit providers to punch a whole in their covering supernet advertisements in order to facilitate this. The PI/PA distinction seems unhelpful in the case of a multi-homed ISP.
The term "tragedy" in "the tragedy of the commons" is not a mistake...
It would be interesting to see multi-homed ISPs take the time to classify the parts of the infrastructure which are hard to renumber, versus those that are easy to renumber. It may be quite trivial to renumber large dial/cable/DSL address pools every now and then, as and when transit providers change. It may be a minor nightmare to renumber nameservers that report authoritatively for domains in a large collection of separately-managed TLDs. I wonder whether the average small, multi-homed ISP who currently lusts after PI space would find all their renumbering nightmares reduced to entirely manageable levels by the delegation of (say) 1 x /24 PI netblock to number nameservers and mail exchangers, and n x /whatever netblocks to number everything else. If the justification requirements for PI space were relaxed to accommodate this kind of scenario (or if ISPs were more inclined to use the existing requirements in this way), perhaps fewer multi- omed ISPs would feel obliged to tell lies to RIRs to obtain address delegations they don't really need. But the DFZ still accumulates additional state every time an edge network multi-homes. It would be interesting to compare the growth in the numbers of single-homed vs. multi-homed edge networks. If the edge of the network is becoming predominantly multi-homed, the goals of the RIRs wrt DFZ state containment might usefully be modified to better serve other objectives. Joe