[85891] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Sprunk)
Tue Oct 18 16:52:19 2005
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>
To: <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com>
Cc: "North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:49:52 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Thus spake <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com>
>> E.g prevously
>> announced address-blocks that has disappeared from the global
>> routing-table for more than X months should go back to the RIR-pool
>> (X<=6).
>
> In RFC 2050 section 3 a)
> the organization has no intention of connecting to
> the Internet-either now or in the future-but it still
> requires a globally unique IP address. The organization
> should consider using reserved addresses from RFC1918.
> If it is determined this is not possible, they can be
> issued unique (if not Internet routable) IP addresses.
>
> Seems to me that the Internet routing table contents
> past and present are irrelevant. Note also that the
> so-called Internet routing table contents vary depending
> on where you look at it.
Obviously if the RIRs contacted the folks responsible for a given block and
were provided justification for its continued allocation, then it should not
be reclaimed. On the other hand, folks sitting on several class Bs and not
using them could have their blocks reclaimed trivially; ditto for companies
that no longer exist. The last is certainly doable without much risk of
controversy.
However, one of the articles referred to recently in this thread (I forget
which) showed that even if we reclaimed all of the address space that is
currently unannounced (in use or not), we'd buy ourselves a trivially short
extension of the IPv4 address space exhaustion date. Considering the cost
of performing the task, doing so seems rather pointless; our time would be
better spent getting IPv6 deployed and either reengineering the routing
system or switching to geo addresses.
S
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin
