North American Network Operators Group
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Re: exponential route prefix growth, was: Re: The Cidr Report

  • From: Chris Chaundy
  • Date: Sat Sep 23 00:11:40 2000 
At 07:47 PM 22/09/2000 -0400, William Waites wrote:


Kai Schlichting <[email protected]> wrote:

> What 'threshold' has triggered this sudden event, with routes going
> from 60,000 to 90,000 in just 12 months? Multihoming becoming
> fashionable? Dinky-rink providers getting multihomed, and for lack

Fashionable or not, multihoming is a usefull and sound practice. The
problem is that regulatory organizations (ex. ARIN) make it very
difficult to do it properly, and so cause inefficient use of address
space and routing table bloat.
I cannot speak about ARIN, but in my interactions with APNIC, they are
all too well aware of the issues around multihoming and global routing
table size. Their job is to manage (/conserve) Internet resources including
AS numbers, and more justification for AS numbers is being required as
time goes on (similar to the experience our US compatriots are discovering
with address space ;-). In some respects, address space conservation is
at odds with routing table minimization, especially in a multihomed world,
and when you throw in commercial pressures, common sense often goes
out the window. The IETF CIDR-D(eployment) group was a forum to thrash
over these issues, but as primarily operational issue, was wound up in the
standards arena after CIDR was widely deployed and the BCP process was
concluded. The IEPG still touches on this, but it really is in the realm of the
operations groups now.

Routing table size may well take over as the 'Internet boogy-man' from
address space exhaustion, and I'm not convinced that IPv6 will help much
here. Best practice behavior will help, but one has to remember the new
universal constant of 'clue factor'.
--
Chris Chaundy (Director - Network Services)

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