[address-policy-wg] IXP pool lower boundary of assignments

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 7, 2022, at 13:00, Tore Anderson wrote:
> Actually, I do have some real-life experience here as I/AS39029 was
> part of the NIX renumbering process back in 2017. The whole operation
> was rather straight-forward and went very smoothly. NIX staff simply
> informed all members of their new IPs by e-mail and told to migrate
> within a certain date (different dates for NIX1 and NIX2).

Well, this seems to be the customer-side experience, not the IXP-side.
Also, what I can see is that responsiveness of NOCs and peering teams of members is only getting worse with time.
At France-IX, just changing a netmask (from /23 to /22) - because we have the biggest 3 out of 5 IXPs numbered from PA space - took just under 2 years to complete (23 months to be precise). More than 80% did the change in less than 3 months, but after 12 months we still had a few members that didn't change their config.
OK, things end up in a slightly more violent manner with renumbering, but you sill end up with "zombie members", not all of them being small players.

/29 is way too small. It's 6 members, and that supposes that you don't have route-servers or any other internal stuff on the peering LAN. Getting from /29 to /25 that's 4 renumberings, and that may well happen within 2 years. You end up being labelled as "unstable" (read "junk" or "toy" IXP). 3 renumberings to get to /26.

> NIX is (and was) a mid-sized IX, currently around 60 participants.
> Based on that experience I have honestly a very hard time believing
> that renumbering a small IX is «much more difficult [than renumbering
> a] data centre or an access provider».

Convincing different distinct parties to do something within a specific timeframe is always difficult. Especially when you have to deal with big companies. 
Pushing things too hard will only get you losing members.....
I do agree that /26 is a decent minimum, and /27 is the strictest acceptable minimum (if there really isn't anything bigger left).
... or getting rid of v4 entirely, which seems to be on nobody's agenda ...

-- 
Radu-Adrian FEURDEAN