Independent space from ARIN

Steve Gibbard scg at gibbard.org
Sat Apr 12 18:59:33 UTC 2003


On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Dan Hollis wrote:

> Would like to hear from anyone who purchased independent address space 
> from ARIN, what issues you had (technical, or otherwise).

First, to satisfy those who care deeply about terminology, you don't
"purchase" IP address space from ARIN.  You have space allocated to you,
and then pay ARIN dues.  You can be the judge of whether that shift in
terminology is of any practical consequence.  I think it's not worth
debating.

There aren't really technical issues with this beyond what you'd have to
deal with with normal IP space.  If you're running BGP, you'll have to
announce the space and get filters updated to allow it, but you have to do
that with a block of IP space you get from a provider anyway.

The political issues can be a little harder.  You'll have to convince your
upstream provder to let you use your own IP space.  If you're dealing with
any of the big backbones, this should be a standard request for them.  If
you're dealing with somebody who sells mostly to small offices, you may be
asking for a significant departure from standard provisioning procedures.
If you've got a sufficiently small or inexperienced ISP, you may find that
they don't understand the concept.  So, depending on who your upstreams
are, this is something to ask about before you go to ARIN and apply for
space.

The process of dealing with ARIN seems to get a lot of people mad, but in
my experience, if you follow the process rather than trying to go around
it, it's pretty easy.

You will have to follow the ARIN guidelines in allocating IP address space
to your customers, and you will need to keep documentation of that.  You
should be doing this anyway.  This data should be accurate.  Most of the
problems I've seen people who otherwise qualified have asking for address
space have been a result of lying on their applications, and then not
being able to keep the lies consistent in response to follow-up questions.
The data should also be kept up to date regularly, not because that's
actually enforced, but because it will cause you to have to do a lot less
scrambling when you suddenly realize you're out of address space.

And then, when you've used up 80% of the space you have, and have all the
assignments SWIPped or in rwhois, you fill out the ARIN form to ask for
more.  You'll probably be asked for some clarification, and perhaps for
some justification of the larger assignments you've made to your
customers.  Answer those questions truthfully, and if your records are
good, you haven't been making assignments you shouldn't have, and your old
block has more than 80% utilization, you should get your new space.

A recent experience I had with a consulting client is a useful lesson.
The client had been being quite careful about their use of IP space, but
was dangerously close to running out.  However, they paniced, decided ARIN
would never believe their story about how the IP space was used, and
instead submitted a form showing what they thought ARIN would want to see.
This resulted in questions, followed by more questions, to the point where
they were ready to give up and declare getting more address space before
running out to be impossible.  I then took over, explained the situation
to people at ARIN, submitted an entirely new application showing exactly
what they were using and nothing more.  I made a phone call to clarify
some points after getting a response from ARIN asking for more
information, and had the new allocation just over 24 hours after applying
for it.

-Steve

--
Steve Gibbard
Steve Gibbard Consulting -- IP network consulting services
Office: 510 528-1263
http://www.gibcons.com/




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