On Wed, Oct 14, 1998 at 03:14:56PM +1300, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
I'd suggest that a maximum period of two months would be a better time scale.
For moving a customer, yes (although I think 3 is better), for moving all of NZ - no.
By "all of NZ" you presumably mean "everybody numbered out of the NZGATE blocks".
Does anyone see any reason for all of NZ to renumber? I like the idea, mainly because NZ address space is a mess, and it would be a good time to clean it up, before it grows much more... beyond the point where its feasible.
I don't think this is feasible.
One of the main objectives I was trying to achieve with my draft was to
avoid placing onerous requirements on any particular network operator and,
in fact, any particular end-user, but at the same time provide a mechanism
which _over_time_ would naturally cause things to become tidier rather
than more messy.
Any proposed action which requires large providers to substantially renumber
their entire networks is inequitable, and will never be agreed across the
board. Without wide agreement, any proposed strategy is next to worthless.
A transition period of 3 months for an end-user to renumber their network
(assuming the subnet used by the customer has a sufficiently narrow mask)
is a perfectly good objective, but we need to make sure that there are
mechanisms available for the operator of the wider supernet to track and
enforce the return of the holes after those three months.
This might sound like I'm advocating some kind of central clearing house for
addresses within NZ which would impartially manage these transitions. I'm
not -- I think the idea of a centralised point of management (in this
application) is inherently bad and dangerous; it could be argued that we have
already followed (or been led down) this road with DOMAINZ.
Something as simple as "when customer X moves between ISP A and ISP B, and
needs to take her networks with her for up to three months, this fact will
be publicised in a public forum by ISP A and B". A suitable public forum in
this instance might be NZNOG.
It would be in ISP A's interests to make the network transition public, so
that there are witnesses :)
It could be argued that there are commercial implications in announcing
customer movement like this, but the information is there, public, waiting
to be read in the routing tables anyway, so it's hardly sensitive.
Joe
--
Joe Abley