North American Network Operators Group

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Internic address allocation policy

  • From: Matthew Kaufman
  • Date: Mon Nov 18 20:10:28 1996

I'm having a problem getting the Internic to allocate additional IP
addresses to us. I'm looking for feedback (public or private) from others
who may have had this problem that I can forward to my lawyers.

Scruz-Net recently merged with another company. As the new company, we
are in the process of deploying a large DS-3 based IP network, with
attachments to more than 5 major interconnect points. As such, we need
address space both for our backbone and our customers.

First, I tried to get address space for the new company. Response was that
under the slow-start policies, I could get nothing bigger than a /19.
Well, that's not interesting, because I'm not about to deliberately subject
myself to routing filters that I think make good technical sense (hello
Sprint). 

So I turned around and said that the EXISTING company (scruz-net) needs more
address space. First off, we got told that because we didn't use our last
allocation (a /16) quickly enough (three months is their suggestion, took
us more like 9-12 months to fill it up, with careful assignment) we obviously
didn't need a block that big. (Now, since the point is to conserve routing
table size among us providers who carry full tables, isn't it better for me
to get a /16 and use it slowly than to get 4 unrelated /18's that each last
three months???)

So then I argued that since the merger has happened, and we have sales
projections that show that with a much larger geographic coverage and
hundreds of people out selling the product, we ought to be using addresses
a bit faster. That started a back-and-forth where I had to "prove" that
a merger had really occured, when I was in fact under legal requirements
to not talk about the merger until it was made public.

Now I guess they believe that, and they've fallen back on the argument
that I don't allocate addresses as well as they'd like. This is based on
looking at our rwhois data. Now, we have large numbers of customers with
small static blocks who don't really want their name and address listed
publically... and so we've listed those blocks as things like 
w.x.y.z/24 -> "workgroup ISDN accounts in San Jose". But that apparently
doesn't satisfy whoever plays [email protected] In fact, upon reviewing
our customer policy about disclosure of customer information, we've had
to turn off our rwhois server entirely until we can go through and seriously
sanitize it.

All I want is some addresses so that I can continue to hook up customers,
allocate additional addresses to providers downstream of us who need more
addresses for *their* customers, and build a backbone network. But I've 
been forced into getting our lawyers involved. 

I never thought that getting another block of IP addresses would come to
that. *sigh*

Again, anybody who's figured out how to force the Internic to be
reasonable about address allocation, *please* drop me a note.

-matthew kaufman
 [email protected]

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