On Wednesday, September 11, 2002, at 04:19 PM, Ewen McNeill wrote:
Andy's response:
[...]
Dean Pemberton and I have been talking with Simon about trying to get WIX and APE whois servers running so that people could start registering routes and AS policy for RPSL use in NZ.
Just out of interest, what's the benefit in running yet another RPSL database?
Using these to allocate locally scoped private ASes for use on the WIX and APE would be a doddle.
Run and hide! There's no reason to break RFC1930. That makes things difficult and confusing, whereas obtaining a globally-unique ASN is simple and easy.
[...]
So it would be nice to get the providers to use them. Some of them resist but surely this is an issue that could be driven by their respective customers. E.g. "As my provider I need you to provide a resilient efficient local mesh at WIX and APE. Perhaps I should consider moving to a provider who...."
... is willing to surrender control of her routing policy to a best-effort coordination service with no responsibility for the quality of the routing data sent to or from her network?
Ewen says:
One of the clients I have in mind has a /27 CIDR block. They're starting to run out of public address space (despite using RFC1918 everywhere it can be used, and lots of NAT), and will probably try asking for more space. But even that more space is likely to be only another /28, another /27, or maybe if they're very lucky one /26.
Tell your client that a requirement to multi-home (whether to multiple transit providers, or to a single transit providers and multiple peers) is adequate justification for being allocated a /24 netblock from their transit provider. Ask, and it will be given.
If the answer is "everyone use RPSL, and persuade people to accept all properly described RPSL lists" then I'm all for it. If the answer is "only providers get to do peering", then that's tantamount to "only people with public ASes get to do peering". And may well lead to a bunch of people chasing public ASes (and provider independant space for that matter) when they don't otherwise need them.
If you want to multi-home using BGP, and you don't want to violate RFC1930, you need a globally-unique ASN. ASNs are not just allocated to providers. So, only people with public ASNs get to do peering, but that doesn't mean that only providers get to do peering. None of this is new. In fact, there was enough of this going on when I was still involved in AS4768 that I *documented* it: http://www.clear.net.nz/documentation/dedicated/multi.html Some of those documents are old enough that they have NZIX in their diagrams :) Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog