Hi, On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Craig Anderson wrote:
The current practice of portability of NZGATE addresses is fair and fits with international practice. Any attempt by Telecom or a consortium of ISPs to limit portability is not a good thing, even if current practice now is for IP addresses to be most often issued in a non-portable fashion.
Craig, all of the recent (post 1996) RFCs and IETF drafts that I have seen make it clear that address portability is inconsistent with having a routable Internet. The regional registries all have policies to reduce route table fragmentation by migrating organisations to provider addressing. I think Joe pretty much assumed that ISPs were aware of the potential problems with portability. If any of the major upstream providers of the New Zealand providers begin to filter small advertisements (say, smaller than /20) then a lot of NZ organisations with "portable" addresses could potentially be cut off from the rest of the world. You can be sure that many of these small routes are not carried globally and only have connectivity because the origin of the supernet routes gets the traffic close enough to a provider that doesn't filter. These small routes are filtered because they would otherwise clog the memory and CPU of routers carrying a "full table". This affects overall Internet stability.
To sumarise: 1) provider based addressing was not widely practiced in 1994. 2) companies obtained class C's from Waikato in that and subsequent years with the understanding that they were portable. 3) there were no distinctions between which addresses were in provider blocks and which weren't in those early years. 4) now that we have provider based addressing, it does not make sense to assume that all the old IP addresses belong to a particular provider.
Perhaps.
5) now that we have provider based addressing, it does not make sense to impose any new limitations on IP addresses obtained earlier. Such addresses may easily require the same portability as is now required of provider blocks.
See above.
6) Neither Telecom's (alleged) ideas nor the draft's suggestions fit accepted international practice for historically assigned IP addresses.
Could you point me at some info on this "accepted international practice"?
-jamie
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Jamie Clark