Renumbering for better aggregation (was Re: too many routes)
J.D. Falk
jdfalk at priori.net
Tue Sep 9 18:12:52 UTC 1997
On Sep 9, Phil Howard <phil at charon.milepost.com> wrote:
> In general, is it better to have you IP space scattered amongst a lot of
> different /24's /25's and /26's or would it be better to collect everything
> into a large /19 or /18, when going to BGP4?
>
> I would think the latter. If so, would anyone know why it is that the
> backbone providers are so resistant to giving out blocks to do this?
> Could it be because they won't be able to do anything with the small
> pieces that get returned and those will end up going to waste because
> they are so fragmented? Or perhaps they don't even have procedures in
> place to do anything with returned address space, yet?
Okay, this is somewhat operational (more policy, but it's
something backbone operators need to think about) -- how
many of y'all actually /do/ have a policy in place for
when your downstream customers want to reaggregate? For
that matter, how many of you have had to think about it
before? (I'm not looking for a show of hands, of course,
just some interesting discussion.)
Personally, I dealt with that somewhat in a previous job,
where we were returning space originally allocated to us
by Net99 (yup, it's a common story), and therefore forcing
just about all of our long-time customers to renumber. It
was not fun, but I tried real hard to make it go well.
So, I figured out which of our customers were in a good
position to be renumbered into a better aggregate block as
long as they were going to have to renumber anyway, and
assigned new addresses accordingly.
The main failing in the plan was that I got assigned to a
different project before the renumbering was completed.
My guess would be that it'd be a little more difficult if
you or your customer were trying to reaggregate without the
impetus that your existing addresses didn't have valid
reverse DNS any more, and were gonna be forcibly reclaimed
in a few months.
*********************************************************
J.D. Falk voice: +1-415-482-2840
Supervisor, Network Operations fax: +1-415-482-2844
PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net
"The People You Know. The People You Trust."
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