-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 All, I'm curious to what extent everyone is checking to determine ownership of IP addresses when taking on new customers. Lately, multi-homing has become a very hot topic for even the smallest of providers. With that, customers are bringing along their IP addresses from their previous providers. Are we required, as providers, to determine if that block is actually owned by that customer, and facilitates good Internet routing? I've seen a trend lately where I'm finding out, after the fact, where pieces of larger CIDR blocks are being taken apart by a myriad of unaggregated routes. The other backbone providers freely allowed an announcement of that non-portable space to the Internet without regard to either the owning provider, or to general Internet routing. My concern is two fold: 1) This contributes to terrible Internet routing. By not addressing this with the customer right away, we'll continue to deal with a proliferation of /24s and Internet bloat. I realize the customer needs its address space to announce separately, but should we allow them to freely announce random /24's? This is only due to that the customer received IPs by growing over the years, rather than getting a single block up front. 2) It seems that other providers are allowing our customers to hijack our routing space piece by piece. I will happily participate in multihoming a customer, but I would hope it involves us. We can make a contiguous allocation from our CIDR blocks, and then work with the customer in a more consistent manner. Much of this is customer education about multihoming, but unfortunately we often find out too late. So the question becomes, what do providers do to determine where a block is coming from, and what is its implications on the global routing system? Just cutting and pasting an email from the customer into an access-list seems to be what we have now... I'd be interested to hear what others thoughts and experience are with this. Perhaps I'm just overly concerned with a normal happening on the Internet. Comments? Tony -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBOwvHa89/cCqjBxGyEQLVUACfeyX9zbWUbhYQyRWP82f+jU5FhXUAoPHT pmjEerQRWEtEJHG0OvMUxDdP =t+ws -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----