North American Network Operators Group
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Re: A slight call to order (Re: Internic address allocation policy )

  • From: Brett Watson
  • Date: Mon Mar 20 12:16:17 1995 
Paul A Vixie
> 
> Second, I've seen Karl and now Alan misuse a term.  I'll pick on Alan since his
> message is right in front of me, but the complaint is general (sorry Alan!):
> 
> > Taking a relatively small chunk of the remaining address space
> > (say, 210.*.*.*) gives us 64k addresses to hand out in convenient
> 
> That's 16M addresses, not 64K addresses.  We should not equivocate "addresses"
> and "Class C networks".  210.*.*.* has 2^24 (minus subnet zero and broadcast
> lossage) addresses -- 16M.  210.*.*.* has 2^16 "Class C networks" -- 64K.  We
> must not assume that every customer will get a Class C -- many will get just a
> subnet since they will only have a handful of hosts.  I know of several 
> providers who are chopping things up on nybble boundaries (16 hosts/net, or
> actually 14 with the subnet zero and broadcast taken out).

  Yep, I did this when I worked for SCCSI in Houston.  We also
had to go through the much-argued address allocation summary, or
*PLAN*, with Sesquinet.  I don't see what everyone is fussing
about.  I made myself nuts for a while trying to guess *exactly*
what my network would look like in 2 years, then 5... and then I
just gave up.  They said to estimate, so I estimated.  And I got
the address space.  Granted, I never had to deal directly with
the NIC but Sesquinet was pretty strict and I still got space.

  They also implemented the IETF recommended formula for
determining usage statistics.  There were a certain number of
hosts on your network which had to be "pingable" and another
percentage that had to be listed in DNS.  Now, our problem was
that we gave out class C addresses subnetted with 255.255.255.252
(yes we wasted half the address space!) for SLIP/PPP accounts.
So we were under our percentage of "pingable" hosts.  Once I
explained why, though, we were ok'd for more addresses. 

  It just seems to me that everyone is taking all of this way out
of bounds.  The internic is strict and sometimes contradicts
itself, I agree.  but all they ask for is a plan, or rather and
*estimate*.  Karl, you say you can't possibly guess those
numbers?  How do you do business then?  You've got to be able to
estimate business and market growth (not bashing you, just don't
understand).

-brett