IPV6 renumbering painless?

Sat Nov 13 17:42:56 UTC 2004

At 09:25 AM 13-11-04 -0800, Randy Bush wrote:

> > Total ASes present in the Internet Routing Table: 18421 <----
> > 30% usage and we need 32 bit ASNs?
>
>george and geoff's movie gives an interesting perspective on
>number of asns allocated and number of asns announced.
>
>like address space, i suspect we have a general issue of if
>and how we recover unused resources.  what may make this
>more difficult than one might think at first blush is what
>george and geoff's movie points out, unused resources tend
>to be those that were allocated long ago.  and we all know
>how easy it is to contact those folk.

As a LIR who has returned 36 ASNs to RIPE over the past 3 years (we still 
have 48 allocated and active), I can admit that it takes hours of 
work.  Once a quarter I scan the routing tables for those that have dropped 
off or become single homed.  Then we try to contact them and get them to 
become multihomed.  If not, phone calls and postal letters ensue with 
deadlines.  Then if they removed my MD5 password, I have to get RIPE DBM 
involved (like if the company went bankrupt and disappeared from the world 
with no one home).  Then  remove all the whois data that references that 
ASN.  It takes 3-4 hours of work to remove a single defunct ASN.

I guess the IETF and router vendors prefer larger fields than having LIRs 
do the work they are supposed to do.

-Hank

>randy