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Re: ARIN?

  • From: Roeland M.J. Meyer
  • Date: Tue Nov 10 00:29:56 1998

At 08:05 PM 11/9/98 -0500, Steven J. Sobol wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 09, 1998 at 10:27:35AM -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
>
>> So it goes from a few hundred MB's to a few GBs? What's the big deal. Given
>> a trivial CustomerDB, in an RDBMS, it's still under 100 GB for a few
>> million IPs. 150 GB of RAID5 is still less than $30KUS and dropping daily,
>> even on HP (High Priced <grin>) equipment.
>
>It seemed to be a lot, to me. Of course, if you had every single IPv4
>address SWIP'd, that'd be 4,294,967,296 records multiplied by the size
>of the record, but not every IP is going to be SWIP'd.

Please bear with me if this seems elementary to y'all.

Lets look at this further. If we assume that only domain-name holders will
manage their DNS entries and make them manage their individual users and
hosts, the there'll be at least two hosts per domain (one server and one
workstation). For a clean sub-net (/31), this burns four IP addresses
(assuming a 1:1 domain/sub-net relation) for two hosts. That's also one
busy server because there's no room for a router or anything else. It's not
exactly efficient either.

Let's skip the intermediate example and go straight to a /29, because a /30
isn't much better (6 ip addresses and four hosts, not much room there
either). Now we have room for a router, file-server, print-server,
web-server, and four workstations. This is a small office. I actually see
the sense in ARIN not SWIPing smaller than a /29. This is the smallest unit
that makes sense. Arranged differently, using NAT, one could have up to 7
workstations and one production server in the Internet and any number of
servers/routers in the intra-net (I actually don't see need for more than
30 of these. That would be a very data-intensive company). This should
cover most small businesses. The trick is in finding out how many servers
and workstations have to have internet visibility and how many are only
there for infrastructure (intra-net).


At MHSC, we assume that all workstations need internet access (browsing and
internet services), but only a small percentage of servers actually have to
have it (serving internet services and corporate connectivity).

What this means for DNS is that only such an office will need to manage
their own DNS entries and that also happens to be the smallest unit that
ARIN will SWIP (we also begin to understand why this is so, although ARIN
should include some of this reasoning in thier web-site, or on the
InterNIC, so that Joe User will understand this too).

Now we get to virtual hosts. The ISP carries these on their DNS servers and
on their web-sites. All of these resolve to the same apache server cluster.
No addreses need be SWIPed unless the domain-name holder also has machines
at their physical location (in which case, see above). These folks don't
"manage" DNS at all because they have no real hosts, they are a virtual
domain in every sense of th term. Their ISP does all the work for them.
Their workstations are probably dynamicly assigned connections from their
ISP as well. The point here is that, since they don't get SWIPed, they
don't need a database entry.

We've now cut down our worst-case scenario, by a factor of eight, to
536,870,912 sub-nets. Even if we assume 2048B per RDBMS entry that comes
out to 1,099,511,627,776 (1.1TB). Hmmm, that's a bit out-there, but do-able
for Oracle. The disk system (15 cascaded RAID5 sub-systems at 100GB each)
should cost about $150KUS at today's prices. However, notice that this is a
worst-case maximum use scenario. We are nowhere near there yet. Kim should
have a better idea, but the real numbers should be one quarter of that,
present utilization, allowing for pre-assigned ip-blocks, and the swamp.

Notice something else, I just talked my-self out of SWIPing anything less
than a /29 and backed into the probable reason ARIN doesn't SWIP anything
less that a /29. Kim; this is NOT an obvious line of reasoning, but is
probably what your analysts went through. You'd catch a LOT less flack if
y'all published these things.

>I don't know what it would require in terms of human processing time, if
>any.

No man-power required, it's all automatable.

___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
___________________________________________ 
I bet the human brain is a kludge.
                -- Marvin Minsky