Hi Craig, On Mon, Oct 12, 1998 at 09:30:23AM +1300, Craig Anderson wrote:
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'm suggesting we attempt to address historical address portability where it was rightfully assumed and that we do not attempt to force migration.
One of the core drivers of my draft was that no network operator (end-user or otherwise) would be obliged to renumber during the normal course of their business activities. Migration would be thrown into the exercise when the network operator next needed to obtain additional address space, or moved provider. Just because network addresses could be considered portable a few years ago doesn't make it so forever - the network is changing, and best current practices change with it.
Also clarification of the "ownership" of the NZGATE addresses would seem to be in order as there seems to be some dispute and confusion there.
That is the main driver for the draft. If subnets delegated from NZGATE blocks are considered portable, then there is no "operational ownership" of the NZGATE supernets worth arguing about -- in this model, the delegated subnets "belong" to the network using them. However, this doesn't scale, and hence the "ownership" rests with the provider. In the case where the provider no longer exists, confusion reigns :)
For NZGATE addresses, i do not believe this is factual.
In addition to my general moaning, the draft specifically penalises many older ISPs (by making the addresses of their servers non-portable) does not address multi-homed use, and does not provide exceptions where portability is reasonable.
This is true. However, these problems are not unique to NZ - they are problems that affect the network as a whole. Provider-based addressing _is_ inconvenient. However, as you mentioned, the move towards provider-based addressing and CIDR aggregation has prolonged the life of the current IPv4 numbered network significantly.
How about policies based more roughly around these ideas:
Those who obtained addresses directly from Waikato with the legitimate understanding they were portable should be treated as portable (/23 or shorter automatically qualifies).
If you can justify a 19-bit (or shorter) prefix block, you can get one direct from APNIC... Perhaps we can circumvent the inconvenience of renumbering for the older ISPs by having APNIC endorse /19s already operated by these ISPs as delegated directly to them?
Addresses obtained from an ISP are not portable and should not be advertised by another ISP (except by agreement).
No provider is allowed to advertise supernets that overlap another providers advertisements (except by agreement).
These two makes lots of sense. I think it is important to take a united front
on these issues and make them widely known amongst users, forever dispersing
the idea of portable address space for small networks.
--
Joe Abley