On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Randy Bush wrote:
Is AS reclaimation an option? We don't know how many 'dark' (unadvertised) AS numbers are used as VPN IDs in 2547 contexts.
do we care? i.e. does it affect the real public internet. are these not like 1918?
nope, they need to be unique... or they SHOULD BE unique (globally unique). As more folks interconnect internally (business mergers, partnerships, things such as this) there will be more clashes on 1918 (raising the evil spectre that is NOT the AC-130, but in fact NAT) and ASN clashes resulting in fragile internal networks needing an ASN swap-out... which is devilishly hard so I've heard. (atleast on a large network)
Current figures indicate that it would work for 3 years if we were able to reclaim ALL unadvertised AS numbers and recycle them. How much effort would it take to get this additional 3 years?
and how much money will lawers make off the ensuing riot?
lawYers will always make money... but I'm not sure that 'unadvertised' is the metric you want to use here. 'unpaid' might be better.