[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-15: IPv4 Allocation Policy for the Africa Portion of the ARIN Region

[jlewis at lewis.org]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Eyal Tevet wrote:

> Although you are correct that it is not impossible to multi-home without
> being in the posession of a portable block when you have 1/2/3
> allocations of /24 blocks, doing so when you have maybe 5 or 6 /26 and
> /25 allocations is effectively impossible. This is largely because most
> larger ISP's (even in South Africa) will ignore any advertisements
> smaller than /24.

AFAIK, ignoring prefixes longer than /24 is pretty common over here too.  
But if I were in the situation above, I'd ask the provider who'd given me 
5 or 6 /26-/25 subnets to aggregate my space and trade in those subnets on 
an equivalent number of /24's or shorter prefixes.

> At the same time, if you do find the need to change upstream providers,
> renumbering out of, say, two to three /24's worth of address space that
> have been reassigned to clients as /30 blocks is not a simple operation.
> (Yes, due to the limited address space our policy is to assign exactly
> /30 blocks to fixed line clients)

It takes time.  I don't see anything unusual about that though.  We don't 
have a "/30 policy", but rather assign what the customer can justify.  
Lots of business DSL customers do NAT on their CPE, so they're just a 
/32, with maybe some port forwarding for an internal mail server.  If they 
want to run their own firewall, we route them a /30 (1 IP for the CPE's 
ethernet, 1 for the firewall).  Renumbering in the other ARIN regions 
sucks just as much as in Africa.  Nobody likes to do it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |  
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________