So while this may look nice and sound good and all that, I hate to ask the obvious question... Who is going to obtain the authority and/or balls to take everyone's currently allocated IP addresses away and start over? Perhaps I missed something in an earlier discussion, but this to me sounds like a very nice, very academic "Hmmmmm" thought process. Unfortunately reformatting the Internet is a little more painful that reformatting your hard drive when it gets out of whack. I guess my question is, what's the point of asking this question now? Scott -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Edward B. DREGER Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 10:48 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: keeping the routing table in check: step 1 Hopefully this thread will be quick and less convoluted. Rather than simply alluding to "one prefix per ASN", I'd like to detail an allocation scheme that works toward that. Find the largest contiguous block. Split in half. Round to appropriate boundary. Assign. Space at the end of the block is reserved for expansion. Ignoring special subnets for simplicity: 0/x, 128/x, 64/x, 192/x, 32/x, 96/x, 160/x, 224/x, 16/x, 48/x, 80/x, 112/x, 144/x, 176/x, 208/x assuming all grow at equal rates. 96/x ends up growing quickly? No problem. Skip 112/x for the time being. In short, allocate IP space logarithmically. Start with /1 alignment, proceed to /2, then /3, and so on. Keep the array as sparse as possible so an assignment can be extended without hitting, say, a stride 4 boundary. Perhaps RIRs should look at filesystems for some hints. Imagine a filesystem that's 30% full yet has as much fragmentation as IPv4 space. Something is wrong. Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.