On Sun, 9 Mar 1997, James Lang wrote:
However the tradition has been to "play nice in the sandbox" and give back addresses which are no longer in use or not needed. Given that the over the last few years the net has taken on a diffrent look and feel I was just wondering if there are any firm rules on this and if not weather someone, or a group of people were looking at the problems this presents?
In a sense, this is one of the reasons that NANOG exists. Both the mailing list and the meetings provide a forum for people to not only share what works operationally, but to work out what is acceptable behavior on the network. However, there are people that doing work that touches on this. There is always RFC 2050 which covers IP allocation guidelines. You might want to read through Randy Bush's slides from the last NANOG on inter-provider cooperation http://www.psg.com/~randy/970210.nanog/ CAIDA and especially CAIDAnce are somewhat relevant http://www.nlanr.net/Caida/ http://www.nlanr.net/COLL/caidance.html You should look through the WG's at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html especially the ones in the OPS section like PIER and GRIP. Since the nature of the network is one of voluntary cooperation to make things work, there are no firm rules and no big brother to see that things are put right. But if people don't play nice in the sandbox they will find it tough to make a living in the sand business :-) Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com