Where to Start

[Jim Fleming <JimFleming@doorstep.unety.net>]

On Monday, April 13, 1998 8:01 PM, Karl Denninger[SMTP:karl@mcs.net] wrote:
<snip>
@
@So why don't we propose this, sell it to ARIN, and implement it?
@

I suggest that ARIN divide the job of "Address Space Clean-Up Management"
and delegate that to various parties (TLD authorities ?) to help with the
clean-up. To do this, you have to have some way to divide the ENTIRE IPv4
address space into management regions (not routing regions).

In my opinion, you have to start at the top and in IPv4 addressing terms
that means the LEFT-most bits working to the right...I have suggested in
the past that TLD authorities be used as points of contact to help with
this activity. It is good to see that RIPE is recognizing that they have
to work hand in hand with the TLD registries to manage a large Internet.

Imagine if there are only 256 TLD slots. Imagine if they are
numbered from 0 to 255. Use a random number generator
to take the current TLDs in the legacy Root Name Servers
and assign a number. There may be 10 or 12 extra slots that
can easily be filled in the next 6 months. The Green Paper
process can help to fill those.

Now, with this 8 bit TLD number (TTTTTTTT), you can overlay
it onto the IPv4 address range in the following manner:

	aaaaaTTT.TTTTTxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx

Now, you run the "aaaaa" field from 0 to 31 over and over and
delegate the entire IPv4 address space to the various TLD
authorities based on their TLD number (TTTTTTTT). This means
that each of the 256 TLD authorities gets 32 hunks of the IPv4
address space to MANAGE, just like the IANA "manages" it.
In effect, you have 256 Jon Postels. This would be more fair.
You can use the UNIX program "jot" to generate the numbering
for these various management regions.

ARIN just has to keep track of the 256 contacts. This might be
manageable with 15 people. Each of the contact people then
can help to set up "neighbor nets" which will add more granularity
to the partitioning of the IPv4 address space. In other words, some
of the xxx bits above would be used to further divide the work.
Each region could decide on how much granularity they want.

Reports could then be generated by each region and sub-region.
These reports would help to provide input to the reclamation project.
Some simple guidelines could be set up for absorbing and aggregating
space. I suspect that a ton of space would be freed up and ISPs
could then be handed /19s without concern because they would
automatically have a regional contact and if they go out of business
it will eventually be reclaimed.

If you start with a system of reclamation then allocation follows
as a back-end to that system. In the current system we have front-end
allocations and little or no reclamation. ARIN could serve the Internet
well by reversing this. In order to do the job correctly, the entire IPv4
space has to be taken as a whole and people will have to accept
that their blocks may end up with a manager half-way around the
world. For some this would not be so bad. Look at all of the people
that live with Jon Postel and the InterNIC half-way around the world.

-
Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation
IBC, Tortola, BVI