The real short-term answer is to universally allow /24 announcements (I disagree with going below /26). If router capabilities do not support this than then the vendors will have to be encouraged to beef up their equipment. (Having just bought three Cisco Catalyst 6509s, with 3524XL end nodes, in the past six months, another few $20K wouldn't send my CPA into a tail-spin.) However, no amount of hardware is going to change filtering policies and that's why I bring this up here. What are the operational alternatives?
Since you mentioned your flame-suit earlier, you may want to lend it out to whoever goes to Verio next to ask that they listen to annoucements of networks smaller then /16. Better yet, let me borrow it for this next post. Hey I'd love it if the ISP's did listen'd to those annoucements. It would solve all our problems, though it may create a new one. The real question to be asking is, can the net handle tables that large?, That would be an interesting way to ask an ISP why they refuse any annoucement for anything smaller then a /16, are they worried their hardware can't take it? If not, why isnt such hardware available? - So then the fingers no longer point at the ISP with the nazi filtering policy but at the evil router vendor for not giving us hardware that can handle about 16 million entries. As for operational alternatives, the only solution I ever see suggested is telling the person who is complaining that said ISP is being a big meanie and filtering out their /24 network (which happens to be in A-Space) is told that he/she should take it up with their own ISP and have them aggregate it properly. I do like this word 'properly' its proper when its not trying to be broken up over many areas, but when a customer has the issue of being broken up all over (per the example given a few emails back on here), the customer is... well screwed. the only answer is to burn the IP blocks up., less IPs for the world, but hey, everyone's hardware has less routes to handle :), before I'm flamed for saying this, let me assure you I do not consider the situation ideal at all. Rodney Caston SBC Internet Services