North American Network Operators Group
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Re: SWIP and Rwhois in the Real World

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Tue Sep 06 17:08:02 2005 
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Crist Clark wrote:


As best I can tell from ARIN documents, ISP still are supposed to SWIP
or use Rwhois for subassignments of /29 and greater. However, is this
still widely practiced these days? Especially among smaller ISPs?

I know the privacy pros and cons, so I don't seek to start those threads
again. I'm interested in what smaller ISPs are actually doing these days.
My experience at a bunch of ISPs of varying sizes I've worked for or consulted for, has been that most haven't until they ran out for the first time. Often, at that point, they weren't keeping especially good track of of what had been used either. What followed was generally lots of scrambling to put the documentation together in a hurry, to avoid having to turn customers away.

Sometimes, they've gone on to repeat the lack of documentation followed by a mad scramble a time or two, but the lesson generally gets learned eventually.

I've never seen ARIN give more space without documentation of the previous allocation that at least looked plausible, and those I've seen try to produce plausible looking instead of factual documentation have generally found themselves very flustered when ARIN started asking questions.

-Steve