[ppml] Re: Independent space from ARIN

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

Here's another message from that NANOG thread.
Given that these messages are from people who are somewhat clued in to 
Internet things, I wonder how much confusion is to be found among the 
average ARIN members?

On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Dan Hollis wrote:

> 
> Would like to hear from anyone who purchased independent address space 
> from ARIN, what issues you had (technical, or otherwise).

What do you mean by "purchased" and "independent"?  Do you just mean 
provider independent space, or is this some other use of independent?
I think ARIN would argue that nobody purchases space from them...you 
basically pay (recurring fees) to use the space (more like a lease).

ARIN is certainly a PITA to deal with.  I've gone through the initial
allocation for one company where we renumbered out of multiple provider
assigned blocks, second and third allocations and a transfer from a
smaller ISP we bought at my current employer (Atlantic.Net).  IIRC (it has 

been quite a while) the initial allocation wasn't so bad.  The biggest 
problem is just record keeping...keeping track of your IP assignments in a 

format that lends itself to easily filling out the ARIN IP request form 
(which keeps changing and getting more detailed).

In my dealings with them, policy and RFC adherence have been inconsistent. 
 
When we got close to filling our initial allocation (a /18), it was 
expanded to a /17 even though our own projections said we'd only use a 
fraction of that additional space in the next few months.  A couple years 
later, when we got close to running out of IPs again, I asked for another 
large block and was given a /19 (which I expect we'll burn through pretty 
quickly if we ever start using it...damn 69/8 filters) and told that we 
should only request/receive a few months supply of IPs at a time.  I 
don't know about everyone else, but I've got better things to do than go 
through the IP request process every few months.  We're a stable company 
that's been doing the ISP thing for 8 years.  Why can't ARIN trust us to 
stick around and keep growing our IP utilization?  Why shouldn't we keep 
getting largeish blocks every year or so and keep our number of announced 
routes down rather than a new little block a couple times a year?  I'd 
much rather announce a few /17's or /16's than a whole bunch of /20's and 
/19's.  I suspect people with BGP routers running short on memory feel the 

same way.  Multiply this by a few thousand ARIN members, and it could make 

a real impact on routing table growth. 

Anyone who's bothered to clean up the ARIN records for IP blocks or ASN's 
for networks they've acquired probably knows what a pain that is.  Ours 
took many months and some help from a 3rd party.

Their latest trick, adding the requirement that IP requests come from a
POC on your ORGID (even if your ORGID has no POCs), and then requiring
requests to modify an ORGID come from a POC on the ORGID (even if your
ORGID has no POCs) was a neat one.  Getting that taken care of was made
even more interesting by the fact that we've changed company names since
our first allocation, and ARIN still knows us as our original name
(changing that is another PITA that hasn't been worth tackling/paying
for...we still own the old name, we just don't use it)...so when they
wanted a fax on company letterhead (for a name that hasn't been used for
several years) where do you think the letterhead came from?

ARIN must be predominantly staffed by Vogons.
 
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