Operational Issues with 69.0.0.0/8...

Fri Dec 6 18:50:26 UTC 2002

Thanks for all of the suggestions we have received.  If I had only known
that talking about ARIN on NANOG was the hot button, I would have
pressed it a long time ago :-)

I do have some operational factoids to add - my prior post was
incomplete.

We are multi-homed in a carrier neutral data center.  It is imperative
that we have our own IP.  I do have some small bits of CIDR from other
ISPs and have already migrated some of the problem customers to other
blocks, but I am not meeting my SLAs with those customers, because we
guarantee multiple paths.

On IP that belongs to an upstream of ours, traffic only comes inbound
through that upstream.  That is a problem.

Sorry if talking about ARIN is off the topic of this list, but the 69/8
CIDR is "broken" (in customer terms) in lots of places on the internet.
ARIN is the one assigning it.  If they keep assigning it before
everyone's access policies recognize it as valid, this "non-operational"
issue is going to cost a lot of people a lot of money in wasted time,
effort and resources.

I know it has been very painful for us.

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd A. Blank 
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 10:23 AM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Operational Issues with 69.0.0.0/8...

The list of inaccessible sites continues to grow:

Add to the list www.oandp.com - that looks like someone's firewall
filtering in front of their DNS server, because we can't even resolve
the DNS.  We still can't get to www.ocas.com, www.lavalife.com, and
www.indofilms.com even after calling and posting repeatedly.  There are
undoubtedly others out there.

Repeated problems posted by myself and others show the extent of the
problem with the 69.0.0.0/8 CIDR, and its lack of dependability - it's a
human thing.  It used to be restricted, so there are a lot of access
lists out there - with all the stuff going on in the last year or so,
half the people blocking it probably don't even know how to unblock it -
i.e. that person no longer works here...

If you look at the address space on IANA,
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space you will see that the
last CIDR ARIN took before 69/8 was over a year prior to the 69/8
assignment.  A lot happened in our industry in that year.  Somewhere,
this process is broken since the last CIDR was assigned to ARIN.

My question is as follows - We are losing customers because of this
problem.  It is costing us reputation and money.  It is out of our
control.  If you were us, what would you do?  We have already asked ARIN
to reassign us to a "friendlier" CIDR, and they refuse.

Suggestions are welcome.

Sincerely,

Todd A. Blank
CTO
IPOutlet LLC
614.207.5853