[1537] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dennis Ferguson)
Thu Jan 25 23:38:50 1996
To: Eric Kozowski <kozowski@structured.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu, cidrd@iepg.org, iab@isi.edu, iesg@isi.edu, iana@isi.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 25 Jan 1996 18:07:51 PST."
<199601260207.SAA00528@chaos.structured.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 20:28:21 -0800
From: Dennis Ferguson <dennis@Ipsilon.COM>
> Here is a memory refresher re: IPv4 address space usage:
[...]
>Tony> CIDRD Minutes
I think you're confusing the number of routes with the amount of address
space routed (the latter is the only thing the note you included commented
on). They're only weakly related.
> This has been my major complaint w/ the whole CIDR/Address Allocation/etc.
> debacle. The ISPs/NSPs are doing one thing regarding address space and the
> US registry is doing another. The allocation policy is not conducive to
> the reducing the number of routes goal.
The "CIDR/Address Allocation/etc." thing has hardly been a "debacle" in
any sense of the word, and I have the existence of a still-operating,
still-growing Internet to prove that. You may not have the historical
perspective to understand just how hard and dangerous a problem this
looked to be 5 or so years ago. Yet the process to get where we are,
from figuring out what one might do about the problem, through the
technology development and deployment, and the policy and reorganization
work to take advantage of what was deployed, was better done than just
about anyone could have expected. This was good work.
My only issue is that, while the book was well written, we didn't end up
doing quite enough to get everyone onto the same page. We are operating
on vectors established 5 years ago, so some minor adjustments are to
be expected. And it shouldn't surprise anyone, considering who did this
work, that the defect we've got is most closely related to policy issues,
since while engineers can occasionally be competent at technology they're
hardly ever good at policy. I think we just need to all agree about which
page we should be on, and I think we'll do just fine at this if we can
talk about policy less in terms of adjectives, and more in terms of numbers
we can measure, since we are mostly all just engineers.
> We need to decide which is a bigger problem - number of routes or remaining
> address space. We can't have it both ways.
I don't think we should touch the question of "bigger" at all, nor do I
think these two goals are in any way mutually exclusive. I just think
there needs to be agreement to be consistent on the means to both ends.
Dennis Ferguson
