Get as much IP space as you ever dreamed of, was: Re: Looking to buy IPv4 addresses from class C swamp

Stephen Sprunk stephen at sprunk.org
Mon Apr 28 23:49:14 UTC 2003


Thus spake "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve at telecomplete.co.uk>
> > N companies can have up to N(N-1) interconnections, which requires
either:
> > a) double NAT, with a single address range for all interconnects
> > b) no NAT, with a unique address range for each interconnect
> > c) very careful management of the RFC1918 space such that no two
companies
> > talking have a collision
> > d) globally unique addresses for each participant using RIRs
> >
> > (c) simply doesn't work in reality, (b) is no better than (d), and (a)
is
> > beyond ugly not to mention incompatible with many apps.
>
> Only because everyone seems to use 10.0.0.x ... of course if you
> only followed the guidelines, rtfm!

If I need several thousand subnets, and my business partners need several
thousand subnets each, then odds are we're going to collide if there's no
entity coordinating things -- and that doesn't consider all of my business
partners' partners.

Gosh, what you need is an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to make sure
no two organizations used the same part of the address space.  I bet you
could devise a system where organizations applied for the amount of space
they need, which would be verified by an impartial authority, and the
results would be published in a whois server.  Of course, this sounds like a
lot of work, so you'd probably establish regional registries to do this...

Either you use globally unique addresses, or you use NAT.  It's that simple.
No other solution scales.

> I dont know the policies very well but are you sure they cant revoke
> dead allocations? For RIR assigned space I thought this was covered,
> so your issue was with the legacy pre-RIR swamp?

Under current reclamation programs, an unannounced legacy allocation is only
reclaimed if the tenant organization fails to respond.  There is no process
for revoking a legacy allocation that is in use, whether announced or not,
whether efficiently used or not.  Likewise, I am not aware of ARIN revoking
any non-legacy allocations for any reason other than failure to pay
rent^Wfees.

> And it cant be that big a deal to make legacy blocks fall into the
> new rules...

You might as well revoke all pre-RIR allocations, it'd be a lot simpler than
doing the research to find 99% of them don't meet RFC2050 requirements.
Now, you can debate the ethics of requiring new organizations to meet a
different standard, but that's another thread.

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking




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