[address-policy-wg] 2014-03 two cents on multi homing ASN requirement

On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 06:07:24PM +0200, Erik Bais wrote:
> > What about the option 2, to limit the amount of AS assignments per
> > LIR to 1000? As far as I understand option would fall within APWG's
> > mandate and address the raised concerns.
> 
> So I need 2 lir's to request 2000 ASn's ? And 3 LIR's for 3000 ASn's ?

Yes, looks like correct math to me. :-)

> Not that I want that many, but I'm thinking that the number might be a
> bit too big. How many ASn's do you expect is regular use within an LIR

Our fear was one LIR consuming all of the remaining ASNs (4.200.000.000 or
so?), this is what I try to address.

> ... I know personally 1 company that hold 99 AS numbers ( legacy ) and
> they actual use is probably less than 30 active AS nr's .. They
> received it from IANA back in the days in order to hand them out to
> customers ... They might not be the only one ... 

That does not bother me.

> Yes doing a max number per LIR would be within the APwg mandate, but
> let's keep things practical ... 

OK!

> And what if you would register an AS within a LIR as an end-user
> assign AS, would that could ? Or only the LIR infra structure AS
> numbers ? 

Can you please rephrase the above paragraph? I don't follow.

> You may want to ask Andrea as he might know what the current number is
> ( max) hold within an LIR ( not including Legacy assigned AS numbers)
> ... Personally I don't think it will be a lot that have more 5 AS'n in
> their LIR ( especially for their own Infra) .. There might be some
> that have a list of AS's requested for end-users. I know I have ...
> But if a customer doesn't require an AS number, why would one request
> an AS number if the customer doesn't understand what BGP is or if they
> don't intend to run BGP ? 

That is entirely up to these LIRs. The purpose of the policy proposal is
to make it easier to obtain an ASN, yet at the same time prevent abusing
the liberty the policy could provide. Obtaining AS numbers should be
simple for both the very large LIRs and the small LIRs. Setting limit to
5 or even 100 would directly lead to issues for some companies.

> Which might actually be the better question in this discussion to ask
> instead of asking if you are going to multihome ... Are you going to
> run BGP ? And if you are, have you considered a private AS to use
> instead of a unique AS number .. Which basically covers everything
> that the NCC should know ... Or am I missing something ? 

Private ASNs are not of any concern to the RIPE NCC. Would be the same
as asking for a /29 or /48 IPv6 and being asked "Have you considered
using ULA Space?". The answer always is "No, I need a globally unique
integer, otherwise I would not go to RIPE NCC for resources"

Currently there are 10.692 LIRs, this means a policy proposal (following
path 2), could lay claim to 10.692.000 ASNs, iff all LIRS would request
the maximum. That unlikely scenario would lead to ~ 0.002% of available
ASNs being consumed.

I am certain only a very small subset of LIRs will need more than a
handful AS number assignments. And in the awkward scenario where some
organisation launches a 2000 new LIRs, this would decrease LIR
membership fee for everybody significantly, yet still pose no real risk
to all ASNs being consumed.

Kind regards,

Job