In a message written on Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 01:36:32PM -0800, David Conrad wrote:
ARIN's job (well, beyond the world travel, publishing comic books, handing out raffle prizes, etc.) is to allocate and register addresses according to community-defined documented policies. I had thought new allocations are based on demonstrated need. The fact that addresses are in use would seem to suggest they're needed. As I've said, I haven't been following ARIN's policy discussions -- can you point me to the policy that says allocations can be denied because you happened to have (demonstrably ill-advisedly) used the wrong bit patterns in setting up your network?
The problem is that "in use" means different things to differnet folks. ifconfig em0 inet 10.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 I'm now using 16 million IP addresses at home. ARIN policy does not allow me to get 16 million public IP addresses as a result, based on the 1 machine I have configured at the moment. In the case at hand we don't know if the original poster configured up /16's on p2p links for two hosts each, or if they have an actual host up and pingable at every single IP address. ARIN has a duty to the community to ask these questions, because otherwise anyone could fabricate a "need" for as many addresses as they want. It would seem the original poster and ARIN have a disagrement in this case as to how many IP addresses are required to support their needs. Perhaps incomplete information was provided, perhaps ARIN staff got it wrong. No one on NANOG has enough information to know either way. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/