Playing nice in the sandbox

Sun Mar 9 08:33:37 UTC 1997

On Sun, 9 Mar 1997, James Lang wrote:

> However the tradition has been
> to "play nice in the sandbox" and give back addresses which are no longer
> in use or not needed.  Given that the over the last few years the net has
> taken on a diffrent look and feel I was just wondering if there are any
> firm rules on this and if not weather someone, or a group of people were
> looking at the problems this presents? 

In a sense, this is one of the reasons that NANOG exists. Both the mailing
list and the meetings provide a forum for people to not only share what
works operationally, but to work out what is acceptable behavior on the
network. However, there are people that doing work that touches on this.

There is always RFC 2050 which covers IP allocation guidelines.

You might want to read through Randy Bush's slides from the last NANOG
on inter-provider cooperation http://www.psg.com/~randy/970210.nanog/

CAIDA and especially CAIDAnce are somewhat relevant
http://www.nlanr.net/Caida/  http://www.nlanr.net/COLL/caidance.html

You should look through the WG's at
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html especially the ones in the
OPS section like PIER and GRIP.

Since the nature of the network is one of voluntary cooperation to make
things work, there are no firm rules and no big brother to see that things
are put right. But if people don't play nice in the sandbox they will find
it tough to make a living in the sand business :-)

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com