Clearly this subject has provoked some very considered discussion on the subject of address portability. For those interested RIPE-127 (http://www.ripe.net/docs/ripe-127.html) provides a useful and lucid dissertation on the subject and offers a number of sensible recommendations. To selectively quote "All early Internet address space assignments were provider independent. Many assignments made by ISPs are also formally provider independent because they lack the clear prior understanding between ISP and customer that the assignment will end with the termination of the service." On the historical side regarding NZGATE I personally believe this is the key issue, i.e. unless you were told the space was not portable then it is. This however begs the question of how best to organise for the future. We are not an ISP in the accepted sense as we do not offer connectivity except as part of an overall package. We are however a significant user of IP addresses for web and mail servers. Joe's possible solution and the discussion so far causes us some concern. Having recently been through the process of re-numbering and implementing NAT it proved a major undertaking and one I would hesitate to repeat. We made a number of errors resulting in outages for our clients and irritation to our suppliers and I am at a loss to see how these could have been avoided. Hopefully with NAT now in place we would make it a little easier however the number and scope of DNS changes, firewall changes, authentication changes and the fact that these must occur in one 'hit' makes it commercially pretty unacceptable. With today's firewalls/proxy servers there should be no issue for even large corporates to renumber over time, given incentive to do so. IPv6 should give this if no other reason. Smaller providers however are faced with significant problems in re-numbering which although they may seem small time are in fact relatively expensive and difficult for such an operator to overcome. We now have an example where one of our clients has been enticed by the offer of a /24 by another ISP with NZGATE addresses to burn, something we are unable to provide. I have to say that I consider this sort of behaviour seriously unethical. For me, key elements of a solution are: 1. Access providers should not be able to hold downstream operators to ransom by withholding IP addresses and forcing such users to renumber if they move. 2. The solution should offer all existing ISP players long term access to the provider independent IP addresses they need to do business. In other words a level playing field. 3. New entrants should not be disadvantaged (as they would be if we have one set of rules for NZGATE addresses) and should also be able to obtain provider independent addresses on terms no less attractive than existing operators enjoy. 4. Incentives to corporates in particular to relinquish unused addresses One of the elements missing here in NZ is the idea of a Local Internet Registry, see http://www.ripe.net/docs/ripe-159.html (which is kind of what I thought NZGATE was). To quote again "Local IRs are typically operated by ISPs and serve the customers of those ISPs as well as the customers of smaller ISPs who are connected to the rest of the Internet through the larger ISP." Seems to me that a Local IR might be really useful. If I can contribute a beer sounds like an excellent scheme. Robert Gray Clearview Communications, Auckland New Zealand bobg(a)clearview.co.nz http://www.clearview.co.nz/ Phone DDI +64 9 529 5704, Fax +64 9 529 5702, Mob +64 25 971 860 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog