At 11:31 PM 11/25/04 -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
I think the policy _SHOULD_ make provisions for end sites and circumstances like this, but, currently, I believe it _DOES NOT_ make such a provision.
I understand the policy in the same way. That said, I believe that the policy is wrong. IMHO, the rules that qualify someone for an AS number should qualify them for a prefix. It need not be a truly long prefix, but larger than a /48. My logic is this. We grant someone an AS number not because we think they are an ISP, but because we believe that they are sufficiently well connected that using BGP to advertise their routing is necessary, and running BGP to a number of neighbors implies an AS number. Well, if you are sufficiently well-connected to need to advertise your routing in BGP, ingress policing is going to materially hurt you in your use of said multiple ISPs. You want an address that you can safely originate from, and you want to be able to use routing to multihome in the other direction. Note that this isn't an argument that all multi-homing should be done using provider-independent addressing. This is an argument that some should. Multihoming for outfits that don't qualify for an AS number still looks for a solution that is implementable by mortals and uses provider-dependent addresses.