a bit more coffee made me realize that what might best occur would be for the rir, some weeks BEFORE assigning from a new block issued by the iana, put up a pingable for that space and announce it on the lists so we can all test BEFORE someone uses space from that block.
Based on what I've seen in last 2 years for all new IANA allocations to RIR, the assignments from the ip blocks do not happen on day one and in fact it takes RIR about 2-3 months before they start using that ip block. During that first couple months RIR makes announcements about the ip block (and we can possibly ask them to make additional announcement around week prior to when ip block first allocation is expected to be made) and some RIRs like RIPE use those 2 months to check reachability of the ips within the block. One of the problems for North America though is that ARIN does not seem to want to get involved in the operation aspects and so it does not do quite as much as for example RIPE. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net