Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Tue Jan 30 10:34:25 UTC 1996

> On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, Alex.Bligh wrote:
> 
> > Ah. That will be the "chemical waste dump" that Daniel K said
> > he didn't care about whether it got routed or not (no offence
> > Daniel - neither do I), and is all but unaggregatable so presumably
> > Sprintlink et al. won't want to waste their CPUs routing it as well.
> > What hope for a customer with those IP numbers?
> 
> They all pay somebody (NSP X) for the following service.
> 
> NSP X announces an aggregate route, ???/8 or whatever, which Sprint and 
> others *WILL* listen to. Then, NSP X reroutes traffic to all those 
> different customers within it's own network. If NSP X needs to route 
> through another NSP for some reason, then NSP X uses an IP tunnel to 
> encapsulate the swampy address.

This is not beautiful but would work but...

> Of course, this may cost more than the swamp customers want to pay, or 
> the swamp customers may not be able to agree enough to create a globally 
> routable aggregate. In that case, they don't get routed. Hopefully they 
> can be convinced to renumber and release the swamp addresses, thus 
> filling in the swamp and allowing somebody to build a nice parking lot, 
> mall and attached apartment buildings.

I obviously didn't quote enough at the top of the message. The point was
tht the potential swamp user wants PI addresses so he can get a more
resilient connection and go multihomed, which was the very reason why
they were thinking about the swamp at all (rather than renumbering
into my easilly routable PA space). Your solution is fine for obstinate
people who don't want to renumber, but the guys I'm concerned with have
a good reason for a short announcement (i.e. they want more resilience).
Now I suppose 2 NSPs could announce ???/8 and aggregate those, and
reroute them, however they would have to be the same 2 NSPs. Also we're
back to the geographic issue on this one, in that its quite likely that
the tunnel of which you talk would go back from mainland Europe,
Stateside, and back to me in the UK, i.e. instead of one transatlantic
hop you get 3.

I'd love to hear any solution where they can renumber *within existing
rules* (remember they aren't a local-IR and can't justify a /19), use
AS based announcement (they have a very good reason for doing this),
and get routed.

Alex Bligh
Xara Networks