consistancy

[Brian Wallingford]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Mike Horwath wrote:

: But....you aren't ARIN, who does, as it stands, has authority to rip
: the addressing out of place.
: 
: Really, if they can dish out the IPs, they can take'em away.

In a utopian world, yes.  But..

: Yes, it would suck.  But wastage is wastage and a site with a /16
: using a few hundred addresses is far more wasteful than any wastage I
: would have by having IP based virtual hosts.

This exact "argument" has been rehashed too many times (I don't doubt
that, in one forum or another, I've initiated it in the past).  ARIN does
*not* have the authority to reclaim legacy space.  Nobody has the
authority to reclaim the terribly, irresponsibly underutilised space
allocated many moons ago.

The only (and unlikely) way to encourage the return of such space would be
(as someone mentioned previously in this thread) to universally filter
announcements from such space.

Let's face it - that is a social problem, and the "solution" mentioned
above will never happen, for many reasons.  (Apathy of large
organizations, poor communication among the very opinionated masses of
smaller organizations, etc.)

Legacy space may as well be written off as unusable.  Saying that almost
makes me physically ill, but it's a fact.

We need to deal with the "here and now", and considering that, I would
expect ARIN to offer some time-limited leeway wrt requesting additional
allocations when unique-ip webhosting is involved.  In the future, such
policy changes which could dramatically affect the operations and bottom
lines of many organizations, should be announced at least 12 months in
advance of implementation, IMHO.

That's all from here.

Cheers,
Brian