Wasted space

Thu Apr 29 23:38:09 UTC 1999

RFC 1035, Section 2.3.1 sez:

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names.  They must
start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.  There are also some
restrictions on the length.  Labels must be 63 characters or less.

Given that "domain names" in this context refers to individual SLD's, there
are significantly fewer than 254x256 "domain names" available.  According to
RFC 1035, there are exactly 26*37^61*36 (428135279974248253859698166549001\
968236527812977171075381544952036285878331983282604984379776447432) labels
available.  While this certainly is a finite resource, the likelihood of it
being exhausted is zero considering the money supply is not large enough to
cover the cost of registering those labels, even at the new wholesale rate
(and one cannot raise the velocity to compensate, considering the turnaround
time on registrations at the current number of registrations); one can then
conclude that labels are therefore an infinite resource for all practical
purposes.

ObRandy: no ip name-server

Stephen

     |          |         Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723
    :|:        :|:        NSA, Network Consulting Engineer
   :|||:      :|||:       14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX
.:|||||||:..:|||||||:.    Pager: 800-365-4578 / 800-901-6078
C I S C O S Y S T E M S   Email: ssprunk at cisco.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Bush <rbush at bainbridge.verio.net>
To: Austin Schutz <tex at shrubbery.net>
Cc: nanog at merit.edu <nanog at merit.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 29, 1999 18:19
Subject: Re: Wasted space

>
>> Equally exciting was the discovery that a large portion of space is
>> maintainer-free
>
>in the irr or (arin|ripe|apnic)?
>
>much of the the former thanks to sean and to baby peter.  the latter should
>not be the case.
>
>> IMO this seems much like those people who hoard domain names, except
>> worse because ipv4 space is finite.
>
>domain names are finite.  254 char limit drawn from an 8-bit char set.
>
>randy