And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Stephen Sprunk stephen at sprunk.org
Tue Oct 18 20:49:52 UTC 2005


Thus spake <Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com>
>> E.g prevously
>> announced address-blocks that has disappeared from the global
>> routing-table for more than X months should go back to the RIR-pool
>> (X<=6).
>
> In RFC 2050 section 3 a)
>   the organization has no intention of connecting to
>   the Internet-either now or in the future-but it still
>   requires a globally unique IP address.  The organization
>   should consider using reserved addresses from RFC1918.
>   If it is determined this is not possible, they can be
>   issued unique (if not Internet routable) IP addresses.
>
> Seems to me that the Internet routing table contents
> past and present are irrelevant. Note also that the
> so-called Internet routing table contents vary depending
> on where you look at it.

Obviously if the RIRs contacted the folks responsible for a given block and 
were provided justification for its continued allocation, then it should not 
be reclaimed.  On the other hand, folks sitting on several class Bs and not 
using them could have their blocks reclaimed trivially; ditto for companies 
that no longer exist.  The last is certainly doable without much risk of 
controversy.

However, one of the articles referred to recently in this thread (I forget 
which) showed that even if we reclaimed all of the address space that is 
currently unannounced (in use or not), we'd buy ourselves a trivially short 
extension of the IPv4 address space exhaustion date.  Considering the cost 
of performing the task, doing so seems rather pointless; our time would be 
better spent getting IPv6 deployed and either reengineering the routing 
system or switching to geo addresses.

S

Stephen Sprunk        "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723           people.  Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS         smart people who disagree with them."  --Aaron Sorkin 




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