On 30 Jul 2005, at 15:03, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
The RIPE NCC has hit strong resistance to reclamation, most often with the argument that the ASes are used in inter-domain routing on the Internet but our BGP data collectors just do not see the paths concerned. It takes considerable effort to do reclamation properly whithout putting the future user of any reclaimed number space at risk!
Anyone who uses the argument of inter-domain routing that are not seen by any data collectors on the Internet should be pointed at RFC1930 and told to renumber their private ASNs.
Just because public route collectors can't see use of an ASN, that doesn't mean the ASN isn't in use; just because it can't be seen doesn't mean it's private-use: it might still feature on routes announced on the Internet, even if the routes don't propagate globally. For a trivial example of this, consider a multilat route server at an exchange point. Unless you measure from within (or downstream of) a peer of the route server, you'll never see the AS number in an AS_PATH attribute. It's fairly clear to me that this is not a suitable candidate for private-use numbering, however. Joe