Portability of 206 address space
Paul Ferguson
pferguso at cisco.com
Tue Jun 4 02:21:13 UTC 1996
At 09:48 PM 6/3/96 -0400, Avi Freedman wrote:
>
>I think portable wrt the NICs may be:
>
>(1) The 'Portable' vs. 'Non-Portable' marker on the ISP IP request template
>
>(2) The 'Portable' vs. 'Non-Portable' marker on whois queries that says:
>
> ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
>
>Now, as to what it *means*, it probably means that if you asked the NIC
>in question, they'd say 'touch luck' if you wanted to contest a SWIPping
>away from you of the space, I suppose.
>
>Of course, since the NIC refuses to delegate > /16s worth of in-addr.arpa,
>unless you have a <= /16 from your provider, you're not going to get useful
>in-addr.arpa from your old provider if they don't want you to.
>
>Avi
>
It would appear, then, that a better definition for 'portable' needs to
come in existence. Which is why I particularly liked
draft-ietf-cidrd-addr-ownership-07.txt.
After re-reading draft-hubbard-registry-guidelines-01.txt, its not readily
apparent what 'portability' really means; I'm not so sure that it was the
goal of the authors to define portability.
It does state, however, that:
[snip]
2) Routability: Distribution of globally unique Internet addresses
in a hierarchical manner, permitting the routing scalability of
the addresses. This scalability is necessary to ensure proper
operation of Internet routing, although it must be stressed that
routability is in no way guaranteed with the allocation or
assignment of IPv4 addresses.
[snip]
Hence my earlier comment.
The topic is discussed in more detail in draft-ietf-cidrd-addr-ownership-07.txt:
[snip]
Since the Internet does not constrain its topology (or allowed
topology changes), we can either have address ownership for everyone
or a routable Internet, but not both, or we need to develop and
deploy new mechanisms (e.g., by decoupling the address owned by the
end users from those used by the Internet routing, and provide
mechanisms to translate between the two). In the absence of new
mechanisms, if we have address ownership ("portable" addresses) for
everyone, then the routing overhead will lead to a breakdown of the
routing system resulting in a fragmented (partitioned) Internet.
Alternately, we can have a routable Internet, but without address
ownership ("portable" addresses) for everyone.
[snip]
- paul
More information about the NANOG
mailing list