[address-policy-wg] Proposal for change to the IPv4 PI allocation policy

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Sascha Lenz wrote:

> The problem is, there is no way to tell anyone what prefixes they "have
> to accept" or not, and i see "the common /24 filter" coming up soon in
> my crystal ball (once again due to RAM/TCAM restrictions).
> Filtering everything longer than /24 is just what the majority of ASs do
> today.

Yes, so if you want to use your assignment (excuse me for not 
understanding the difference) in real life internet, you need /24 or 
bigger.

> Hence, no real way to put such an abitrary number in a policy document.

Well, if you remove the "you cannot use routing reasons for requesting a 
certain size"-part of the policy, the requesting party can try to justify 
their request from all aspects that they need to take into account. If the 
space is not going to be routed, they can use smaller than /24, if they 
want to multihome and have good justification, then they can request a /24 
even if they cannot justify it from a pure IP usage aspect.

> I have no problem with wasting IPv4 space at all, so i won't object any

Well, I am not sure it's wasting IPv4 space anyway, as people still get 
/24 today, but they get it by falsifying information. A lot of people know 
in practice how to get what they want, but they need to be creative with 
the truth to get there.

> But what comes next? Same for IPv6? Let's assign /32 due to routing
> reasons? (yes, yes, yes! stubborn /32-/35 filter-guys die die die :-) )

Could we please look at each proposed change on its own merit without 
expanding the scope to other protocols? I am not sure there is a BCP on 
IPv6 yet? If there is, I am sure it's much more flexible and can be more 
easily changed than current IPv4 implementation.

> Probably we just should keep the policy, but put some more stress on the
> routing issue in the supporting documents/FAQs, so "new" people don't
> waste their time requesting 100 IPv4 PI Addresses or so and rant about
> it after they started realizing that this probably isn't what they
> wanted in the first place.
> Though, that doesn't solve the "lieing" problem.

Exactly. My view is that if you need to multihome on the public internet 
today you need a /24 in real life to get it to work. If you cannot get 
that /24, you might as well not get anything at all. Assigning a /27 to 
them will not solve their problem.

I think it's very important to make RIPE, ARIN, AP-NIC et al, who assign 
addresses to work together with the people doing the routing BCPs. 
Addresses are nothing without routing, and we need to look at the big 
picture. People want to communicate.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se