While it's definitely worth submitting it to completewhois and developing whatever paper trail it takes to give it back to the registrars if they don't want to keep it, another obvious stopgap would be to advertise the space,
Does anyone actually have a low-cost offering to do this officially? This is almost a network operation issue, even if it's more about network non-operation. =) Part of the whole point is that people stop routing the space itself in the first place, for many reasons. In my case, it's gotten harder and harder to find ISPs who have the clue/pricing to actually route space they didn't get assigned. I'm not a big bandwidth customer, but (when budget again allows) would like to have portable space that isn't tied to a single upstream. I've received a couple offers of help, but doubt we want to advocate setting up a volunteer network of nice guy ASs. It would seem to be a relatively easy offering to make, not really any more complicated than domain name parking or any of the other services that tend to be in the "add to configuration once, remove at end of service" category. I do think it's worth paying a few bucks for, and would happily have done so before, even without knowing what trouble NOT advertising it would lead to. Either a parking web-site or even a null route would have simplified life dramatically. A tunnel to a residential linux/bsd box would have been nifty, if not particularly reliable or wise. Anyone? Should such a boutique offering be official somewhere or what would be the reason not to? -- Ray Wong rayw@rayw.net