As part of Canadian Internet Community, we have been following the CIDR guidelines. We also do not route IPs from other CIDR blocks. Michael Gibson Sr. Network Admin - Netcom Canada -----Original Message----- From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu> Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 5:13 PM Subject: Re: Routing Policy and http://rs.arin.net/ip-allocation.html

On Wed, 6 May 1998, Mark Kent wrote:

...

That is the wrong question to ask. The real question is who has been handing out 206.116/16 like they were dealing cards? A quick look at the announcments and in whois.arin.net reveals a bunch of /24 spread out over Canada.

This is because historically, addresses in Canada were handed out without regard to CIDR even after everyone else was doing CIDR allocations. A couple of years ago the Canadian IP registry was shut down and allocations since that time have followed CIDR guidelines more closely. If you want to see an excellent example of the kind of things that used to happen, have a look at "whois -h whois.arin.net 199.166.227". In 1994 I applied for a CIDR block of two Class C's, i.e. a /23 and this is what I got. Look closely now... If you still can't see the problem try writing both /24's in binary one above the other.

...

Historically, and currently, the Canadians crowd the top of the Tony Bates cidr list. Why is that?

Part of it is because of the above allocation problem but another large part of the problem is a severe lack of clue. Not enough Canadians go to NANOG meetings to learn how to run a network properly, especially at the Canadian backbone providers. Even when there were 10 provincial backbones within the CA*NET consortium, the knowledge transfer just did not take place. In some provinces like Ontario the network operators seemed more interested in socialist politics than in running a network properly.

Things are a bit better now in some regions and in some companies but there is still a lot more knowledge sharing that could be done.

And if anyone wants to flame me for this, please don't inflict it on the NANOG list. Instead, come see me in person this weekend at the 12th annual Canadian Internet conference http://www.net98.bc.ca and tell me what a twit I am. I'll even buy you a beer.

-- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com