Multi-Homed Swamp Space (was: Your class 'B' address space)

Thu Oct 1 06:25:50 UTC 1998

Catching up on NANOG, I could not resist responding here:

> Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 10:08:34 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Michael Dillon <michael at memra.com>
> If the registries would start allocating address space that has been
> recovered from the swamp to this sort of company, then the problem would
> be solved. If a company needs multihoming capability but will never use
> more than a /23 then what is wrong with reusing swamp space?
>
I just tried 2 weeks ago to reuse one of my own old swamp blocks
(192.138.173.0) that had been out of production for a number of years.

Upstreams are MCI and eSpire.  Got it in the RR via MCI.  Seems to have
propagated into many other nets by the following day.

But for some odd reason, SprintLink had problems and AOL never worked.
After calling them, SprintLink began to route it, but it went away again
the next morning.  Access to AOL servers from dial-in equipment in that
/24 block never completed a TCP handshake, despite that a traceroute
seems to work (although it's hard to tell, as the AOL servers didn't
respond on the last hop).

After a few days, had to move into another MCI /24 block.  Customers
seem to want to talk to AOL, and vice versa.... :-(

Anyway, looks like using swamp space for multi-homed nets and servers
doesn't work.  Too much hand configuration.

WSimpson at UMich.edu
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32