On 16/11/2004 01:24, Owen DeLong wrote:
ASNs issued today are subject to annual renewal. While this is a small charge and doesn't go up based on the number of ASNs, so, not 100% effective at reclaiming all unused resources, it does, at least, reclaim resources in use by defunct organizations that are no longer paying the maintenance for them.
At least for RIPE-issued AS#s, it's damned near impossible to give them back once they've been used for peering. As a result of mergers, I've been left with AS16102 that's no longer required but it's referenced from a number of other ASes as a result of having been used for peering in the past. Some of the ASes it's been reference from are abandoned (Company no longer exists as AS isn't in the global routing table, or it exists and is still peering but the owner has no BGP clue left on staff) which means I can't delete it from the database. I've bought this up with a couple of people and I believe it's been discussed in the appropriate RIPE WGs, but AS# exhaustion isn't currently regarded as a pressing enough issue that anyone has thought up a suitable solution. I guess when we do start running *really* short on AS#s, RIRs will start being much more aggress reclaiming unused AS#s and we'll probably see quite a few suddenly become usable.
On 2004-11-14, at 18.10, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 13-nov-04, at 18:11, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
30% usage and we need 32 bit ASNs?
Usage is of course irrelevant, what counts is how many free ones are left. This number is well below 70%.
We would be better off upgrading to 32 bits AS numbers sooner rather than later (unless we're confident we'll never run out of 16 bit ones) because this way there are enough 16 bit AS numbers left. The current 32 bit AS number proposal (that has been around for at least 4 years now) should work very well for routers that aren't upgraded as long as only leaf sites use the 32 bit AS numbers. 32 bit AS numbers for transit ASes are best avoided until everyone has upgraded.
"32-bits should be enough for anyone", right? :-)
While I do think we need to start the upgrade process, I actually think that we still need to find a process to reclaim unused resources. Otherwise we will be back here sooner than later. And it will be much harder to get these resources back when the net is even larger than today...
- kurtis -
-- Ryan O'Connell - CCIE #8174 <ryan@complicity.co.uk> - http://www.complicity.co.uk I'm not losing my mind, no I'm not changing my lines, I'm just learning new things with the passage of time