[ppml] ppml 2002-7

[Forrest]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Alec H. Peterson wrote:

> We used to allocate /24s, and now we have a horrible mess of unaggregatable 
> space (the swamp, 205/8 is pre-/19 space).  Current allocation policy has 
> not stopped people from announcing /24s, but it at least allows people to 
> aggregate to a certain degree and still be able to reach the entire 
> Internet.

It seems like alot of the people announcing /24's are not doing it to 
provide redundancy, but rather to load balance between their two circuits.  
I can completely understand filtering these /24's, but in the process it 
hurts the small organization that wants to multihome for redundancy but 
isn't large enough to qualify for a /20.  In reality, the current ARIN 
allocation policy actually seems to encourage the wasting of IP address 
space just to be able to qualify for a /19, when perhaps only a /22 would 
be more than plenty.  You only have to look at some of these web hosting 
companies to see evidence of wasting IP addresses.  I've seen a whole /25 
assigned to ONE single webserver before, even when virtual hosting would 
have worked just fine.  


> 
> If we do allocate /24s, even from existing swamp space, eventually we'll 
> run out and we'll have to create a new swamp.  It seems to me that this 
> would be failing to learn from previous mistakes.
> 

I don't see anything necessarily bad with a new swamp if all of the 
addresses in it are used to multihome.  It would be silly to assign a /24 
to someone that only connects to one provider, since you could just give 
them a /24 from the provider's larger aggregate.  If you quit multihoming, 
you return your addresses back to the "multihome swamp".  This would allow 
providers to filter out the useless /24's (like the /18 being announced as 
64 /24's, yet allow them to accept somewhat more important small 
multihoming blocks).

Forrest