Redundant AS's

Wed Mar 18 13:44:50 UTC 2009

> When I look at this more recently, the conclusion still seems to be
> valid: we'll run out of 16 bit ASN's somewhere in 2011 to 2013.  There
> are a lot of unused ASN's out there.  Recovering them will postpone the
> problem by a few years but it won't solve it.  The basic problem with
> recovery is how to decide if an ASN is really no longer used/needed.
> There is (still) no mechanism to do this.

sounds a lot like IPv4 space, eh?

> Why not go after low lying fruit first?  If an ASN was assigned years
> ago and hasn't appeared in the RIB for the past year that ASN should
> be reclaimed.  Send warning emails to the registered contacts as well
> as to the assigning LIR and after 3 months - just reclaim it.

because property is unused publicly does not affect the rights of its
owner(s).  otherwise old car collector wannabes could have a heyday.

perhaps the world would be a better place if we spent less energy on net
vigilanteism and more on moving to IPv6 and 4-byte AS numbers.

randy