/24s run amuck

Thu Jan 15 06:18:56 UTC 2004

Hi Sean, long time no spar. :)

Going to Miami?  I'll buy you a drink.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

On Jan 14, 2004, at 7:14 AM, Sean M.Doran wrote:
>
> Unfortunately there has been a macroeconomic cost to the growth of 
> background noise in the Internet -- and the noise is still there -- 
> which has made the Internet as a whole more expensive and less widely 
> available than it ought to be.  However, there are much larger 
> contributions of such waste outside the public Internet's routing 
> system that dwarf the cost of the unnecessary demands on router power 
> resulting from poor aggregation, poor hygiene, and poor stabilization 
> practices.

Interestingly, the main reason I wanted to stop filtering on 
/18|/19|/20 filtering is precisely the thing you say is hurt by lack of 
filtering - availability.

A small ISP who wants two upstreams but did not have the customers to 
support a /19 back in the day was forced to deal with partial 
connectivity from one of their upstreams.  Today anyone can have robust 
connectivity, no matter how small their network, even if they are not 
an ISP.

I believe this has helped the Internet, not hurt it.  If everyone but 
major backbones were forced to be single homed, I doubt the 'Net would 
be where it is today.

[Guess I should start reading my multi6 folder if I don't wanna go 
through this again in a few years, huh? :-]

>> Almost everyone filters on /24s - they do not want to see /32s in the 
>> global table.
>
> Why not?   I'm curious about why /24s are OK but /32s are not.

Because that is where the Internet decided the break point should be - 
small enough to not upset people handing them out, but large enough to 
not have too many in the global table.  If ISPs were handing out /26s 
to people who wanted to multi-home, that is where the break point would 
be.

To be honest, I suspect it had more to do with inertia than a 
well-thought-out-plan.  Lots of people had "Class Cs", so it just 
stuck.  But the fact remains that anyone who wants to multi-home can 
get a /24, so the table only has to support /24s.

> I suggest that if there is no reason other than a watered down version 
> of the voodoo mentality you've accused me personally of having with 
> respect to long prefixes -- i.e., if you think I'm right about the 
> problem but too aggressive about the limit -- that there is a business 
> opportunity still waiting to be exploited by someone enterprising.

Interesting way of putting it.  Yes, I think some level of filtering 
needs to be done, and yes I think you were too aggressive.  Neither of 
these are secrets to anyone who's been on the 'Net for a few years.  
But how we came to our decisions are very different.

Is there a business opportunity?  Maybe.  Personally I think the time 
has past.  The Internet is a commodity, trying to put on unneeded 
expenses or restricting access only loses you customers and therefore 
money.  But I could be wrong, try setting up your idea and prove me 
wrong by getting rich off it.

> With respect to that, for my part I wish I could go back in time and 
> complete the next phase of the filtering, viz. a web page which would 
> accept a credit card number from anyone who wanted to have a 
> particular prefix allowed through the access-list, for a small 
> recurring fee.

The problem with your idea is it requires collusion.  The only way to 
get it to work is to guarantee that everyone does it, no one breaks 
ranks.  Otherwise when you set up your web page, everyone else says 
"we'll do it for free", and then you're out of biz. :)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick