Comments on draft-ietf-cidrd-ownership-01.txt

Wed Aug 23 19:44:46 UTC 1995

>         Last week I sent detailed comments on the "Ownership" I-D to the
> cidrd mailing list.  Scott Bradner (Ops AD) asked me to submit the comments
> that I wrote as an I-D for wider dissemination.  I added an introduction
> (summary) and an ending (recommendations) around the original comments on
> the Ownership (leasing) proposal.

Comments on some of the parts of your draft:

     The document goes on to describe the nature and benefits of
     hierarchical addressing.  It then, incorrectly, asserts that the
     Internet topology reflects a hierarchy and that addresses must be
     kept aligned with the hierarchy.  This requirement is used to
     assert the need for enforcing addressing changes when (some)
     topological changes take place.  The document makes no effort to
     deal with the very real difficulties this model creates for
     multi-homed organizations, including local service providers.
     Working group discussions have left the issue with citations to
     the original CIDR document, but it offers no real guidance either,
     since it largely presumes the NSFNet as the top of the Internet's
     topology.

While the document may be lacking in various areas, it does not presume
that the NSFNet is the top of Internet's topology.  All of us that have
been working on this draft have been intimately involved w/ the
shutdown of the NSFNET.  We know its gone.

There is a loose hierarchy in the internet today - its made up of a
partially meshed interconnection of several hundred ASs - not of an
arbitrary mesh of a few 100,000s of organizations.  [Note that a
multihomed site (and there are few few of these today) are some of
these ASs - they are a distinct piece of the hierarchy.]  If we could
reduce the routing entries to one (or a few) routes per AS, then we
would have a major major win.

	(Yes, I did say experimental.  Contrary to the comments on the
	cidrd mailing list there has been no large scale use of a
	leasing policy

Several internet services providers are doing just this - PSI (for
instance) charges differently for leased address space and has done so
for a while now.  AlterNet has always requested new customers to
renumber into our space and for leaving customers to return address
space; we actually have quite a good complience with this.

	--asp at uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)