sooner or later we will have to kill off the /24's, which make up 70% of
the routing table but offer way less than 10% of the total reachable
destinations. perhaps now that address ownership has been put to bed,
the gang of big providers can agree on a date after which they will all
stop listening to or exporting any prefixes longer than /23? THAT would
be the incentive the industry needs to look at private addressing and
aggressive renumbering. who's willing to risk collusion lawsuits and
lost customers? step right up and sign the register please.
I would recommend that the PIER group work with providers on this; PIER
would be a great organization to take the huge ACTIVE table of /24's and
mail the listed contacts for the network to offer tools, easier renumbering
methods, etc., to minimize impact to the network's customers. Once
all the mails are sent out and a semi-generous grace period is set, PIER
should recommend a date providers should stop listening to /24 announcements.
Granted, ISP's wouldn't have to follow this recommendation and could cut
off such announcements at any given time; they follow the risk of more
impact to their customers as Paul mentions above.
I would ALSO recommend to ISP's who wish to implement this that they not
be hypocritical. We've heard the ISP stories where particular ISPs want
to filter out routes for larger prefixes, but are GLAD to advertise a /23
if it gains that particular ISP money.
/cah
You don't risk collusion lawsuits by announcing that you are considering
this action and strongly urging people to look at RFC1918 and renumbering.
You could probably even get away with something like:
"NANOG agrees that the only way to avert the pending
collapse of the Internet (see From The Ether, Infoworld, Apr 1 1996)
is to stop routing the old Class C networks to reduce
global routing table sizes. To this end NANOG is strongly
urging organizations using Class C addresses to either switch
to using RFC1918 private network addresses or to renumber
their Class C address into a provider aggregate. By doing this
you will maintain uninterrupted global connectivity. Action
to cease carrying the old Class C addresses is contemplated
to begin Sept 1st 1996. If you are unsure whether you Class C
addresses are part of a provider's CIDR aggregate we suggest that
you contact your provider immediately.
Before the explosive growth of the Internet occurred 3 years ago
many people felt that Internet network addresses could be
assigned permanently and stay with an organization even if it moved
from one provider to another. Unfortunately the sheer size of the
Internet is now outpacing the capabilities of state-of-the-art
routing equipment. NANOG has for some time been encouraging
new network number allocations to be made out of topologically
based aggregates so that the global routing tables need only
maintain a single route pointing towards a local provider. This
has helped slow down routing table growth, but it is not enough.
The Internet already has periodic outages caused by the size of the
global routing tables and more drastic action needs to be taken.
NANOG is recommending that major network providers limit the
size of the routes they carry. This means that they would no
longer carry routes to the smaller networks which currently take
up 70% of the global routing table space.
Information on how to plan for and accomplish renumbering of
your network is available at http://www.isi.edu/div7/pier/
You may prefer to renumber using private network addresses
http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1918.txt
in order to avoid renumbering in the future."
Did I say anything that indicates collusion?
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com