North American Network Operators Group

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Re: A slight call to order (Re: Internic address allocation policy )

  • From: Alan Hannan
  • Date: Mon Mar 20 12:42:16 1995

Mr. Vixie wrote:
> 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

  Not to add insult, but that message was +_to_+ me, not +_from_+ me... ;)

  I do fully understand the fact that a class C network is nothing other than
an arbitrarily sized network.  This is part of the general problem causing
reaction by the Internic, I believe.  They have perhaps reacted too strongly
fearing that all people who come with plans have _not_ considered subnetting,
thereby penalizing the whole, when without argument there have been people who
have adequately planned efficiency, but been told they had not.  Whenever I get
new customers, I explain to them the joys of subnetting.  Often they say it 
would be easier to get a class B network.  I laugh and say it would be easier 
to get a class A but it's not going to happen.  The only question here is 
trading convenience for efficiency, at least to the person applying.  And 
people will rarely choose efficiency voluntarily, hence the Internic/applicant
quarrel.

  So, we run into two seperate discussions:

	1) How do we ration IP numbers?

	2) How do we aggregate IP numbers.

  This discussion has taken place several times, but I offer my two cents:

  This proposal embodies pieces of both George Herbert and Vixie's ideas.  We 
split off, oh say, 3 Class A sized CIDR blocks.  Split these into, oh, say
24 Aggregate blocks, each of which having the 13 bits of subnet mask, and 19
bits of network space.  Then we assign these 24 blocks to "responsible" ISPs.
  These ISPs would then be tasked with efficiently managing these networks
until, oh, say the year 2000.  By then IPng will be out, right? ;)

  Perhaps we'd vary the size of the blocks, perhaps not, regardless, this 
delegates out the workload and should stop the finger pointing, or at least
make it local.

  The kicker is that I would like to see some sort of arbitration group heading
up the "Fairness" of the allocation.  Whether this is the Internic, or Vixie's
World Internet Address Allocation Committee, someone in place to see that
DUMBOnet isn't mismanaging their IPs, and that they aren't charging too much
for the administration costs.

  Comments?

-- 
Alan Hannan		      	    (402) 472-0241         MIDnet Inc.
------------------------------\ fax (402) 472-0240   A Global Internet Company
" All perception of truth is   \_________________________
  the detection of an analogy " -- Henry David Thoreau   \____________________