Basic Techical Background and Discussion

Thank you.

Leonardo Ramos
Planning Director
Sociedad de Desarrollo

----------
> I agree that the most meaningful participation in the NAIPR list requires
> significant background in addressing and routing practice. I respect
people
> here who know when they don't know.  I also respect people who are
> legitimate experts.  To help the first group, here are some notes on
things
> that might be less familiar, for example, to someone very experienced at
> web services but less so with other aspects of Internet service provision.
> I'll add  references to bibliography provided by others.  This is
something
> of a coffee-free brain dump, so I apologize for any editing errors.
>
> Basic Terminology
> -----------------
>
> In current Internet practice, the terms "network" and "subnet" are
> obsolete.  Instead, address space is allocated in CIDR blocks, whose
prefix
> length is shown with a value shown with a slash following the address:
> 192.168.0.0/24 is a "24-bit" prefix corresponding to a single Class C.
The
> original IP RFC, http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc760.txt didn't have a
> concept of classes; everything was an 8-bit prefix that allowed as many as
> 200+ networks!  Remember, this was 1981.  Within the same year, it was
> realized that this was not enough, and classes were born in
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc791.txt
>
> I always regret it, but North American English is a language in which we
> drive on parkways and park in driveways.  So when we speak of a "shorter"
> prefix such as 192.168.0.0/23, we speak of a block of addresses that can
> hold more, not less, hosts.
>
> In traditional subnetting, introduced a few years later in
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc950.txt we start with a classful prefix
> (i.e., a /8, /16, or /24 block corresponding to a Class A/B/C), and extend
> the prefix to the right, creating more and more prefixes that can hold
less
> and less hosts.  This is useful because individual media generally need
> unique prefixes, and LANs need those.
>
> Traditionally, addresses were assigned to organizations as Class A/B/C
> networks, and these networks were advertised on global Internet routers.
> Individual subnets were not advertised. People spoke of advertising
summary
> routes that covered all their subnets.  If you think of subnetting as
> extending the prefix to the right, summarization moved it back to the
left.
>
> Some organizations and network providers had multiple contiguous networks
> assigned.  The idea of supernetting was introduced in
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1338.txt as a means of summarizing multiple
> summaries, further reducing the number of routes reported.  This was a
1992
> RFC intended as a 3-year fix.  It matured into CIDR.  See
> http://www.rain.net/faqs/cidr.faq.html and a series of RFCs beginning with
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1518.txt
>
> The best table I know of to see how many addresses you'll get for a given
> prefix length is in http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1878.txt.
>
> Why was this needed?
> --------------------
>
> Several reasons.  One was a shortage of assignable prefixes in the Class B
> range.  Class B's were too large for many enterprises, but Class C was too
> small.  Assigning Class B's because they were convenient "trapped" many
> addresses, much as the area codes for Nevada and Rhode Island "trap"
> telephone numbers that would be useful to have in Lower Manhattan.
>
> Without getting into BGP details, and certainly not getting into the
> conspiracy theories, commercially supported routers started to have memory
> and CPU limitations in handling the global routing table, and in
processing
> it when certain types of changes, some pathological, occurred.
>
> A general operational requirement was seen that short-term router survival
> depended on not having too many routes in the global routing table.
> Uncontrolled allocation was causing the number of routes to double every
> 5-9 months, but router power to handle more routes  was doubling about
> every 18 months.
>
> Why Aggregate into the Big Guys?
> --------------------------------
>
> The only method to reduce route growth about which consensus could be
> reached is to aggregate advertisements as much as possible.  Since most
> organizations did not have physical connections to one another, just as a
> small telephone company in rural Texas does not have a physical connection
> to a small telephone company in rural Virginia, most organizations in fact
> connected to a "backbone," once a formal structure but now a group of
large
> service providers.
>
> Since most organizations connected to large providers anyway, either
> directly or through local/regional providers, the idea of "provider-based
> aggregation" emerged.  If smaller organizations could include their route
> advertisements in those of a major carrier, and people needed to go
through
> that major carrier to reach them in any event, growth of the global
routing
> tables could slow.
>
> Several conspiracies are usually brought out here:  one of router
> manufacturers that they forced an aggregation strategy that preserved the
> life of their products, and one of major providers who wanted to "marry"
> small clients to them.  I will simply wave to the black helicopters and go
> on; whether or not there is a conspiracy is a matter of faith.  My
personal
> position is there is not, but rather a series of decisions made on the fly
> to solve growth problems while maintaining compatibility.
>
> As several people have pointed out, there really has been an economic
> disincentive for small organizations to get "provider-independent (PI)"
> space, which is what the registries allocate.  The registries encourage
> small organization to "borrow" address space from an "upstream" provider,
> and actively discourage them to get PI space.   I believe the underlying
> reason has been to encourage aggregation for the stability of the global
> routing system, rather than presenting a bar to entry for small ISPs.
> Others will differ.
>
> What's the Problem with Provider-Based Aggregation
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> A couple of things.  One, if a small ISP or enterprise used address space
> suballocated from the major service provider block, and wanted to change
> providers, they (and their customers) would eventually have to change
their
> numbers to those in the new provider's block.
>
> Two, this model assumes a strict hierarchy of enterprise, to regional, to
> national.  What if the top-level provider breaks?  Again without getting
> into BGP and operational practice detail, provider-based allocation
becomes
> messy when a lower-level ISP or enterprise wants redundant connectivity
> through two or more major carriers.  Do they get their own addresses that
> will then be advertised into the global routing table by both major
> carriers?  If they use only one carrier's address space, how does the rest
> of the world know they are reachable through the second carrier?
>
> There are no perfect answers to either problem, especially the second.
The
> general strategy to deal with the first is to recognize virtually all
> enterprises and ISPs will need periodically to renumber for an assortment
> of reasons, and to accept this.  Once this is accepted, effort can be
> expended to make old and expecially new networks "renumbering friendly."
> Techniques for doing this have been the focus of the IETF PIER Working
> Group, see http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2071.txt and
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1338.txt .  The crackers of the world have
> helped us in a perverse way; most firewalls can do address translation and
> avoid the need to renumber many internal addresses in a provider change.
>
> Multihoming really doesn't yet have a clean solution.  There are
> workarounds and proposals, but no consensus.  Dealing with multihoming,
> however, has other aspects for the small ISP.
>
> Using a personal example, I was very happy, when I had a quadruple heart
> bypass, that my surgeon did several per week.  One's chances of survival
> are much better in a place that does such operations frequently.
>
> And so it is with operational BGP.  There are nuances to BGP configuration
> and troubleshooting, especially in multihoming, that are hard to work with
> if you don't work with them frequently, follow the appropriate
intercarrier
> operational mailing lists, etc.  Small providers usually can't justify
> staff that has this specialized expertise, and IMHO are better off
> outsourcing this to an experienced carrier until they grow to a size when
> they can have in-house experts.  It usually works out that they can afford
> such at roughly the same time they can justify provider-independent space
> from the registries under the current guidelines in
> http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2050.txt
>
>
>
> Howard Berkowitz
> PSC International