[ppml] Policy Revision Proposal

[Phil Howard]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 01:38:44AM -0600, Mury wrote:

| I certainly understand the pain of renumbering.  I've had to do it half a
| dozen times... at least.  It's certainly not as easy as some people claim.
| Renumbering our own network is a significant task, and coordinating with
| customers takes even more time and effort.

The issues in renumbering are not just limited to what it takes to change
each machine's numbers, and corresponding DNS entries.  Depending on what
kinds of business you're doing, other factors enter into it as well.  For
me, renumbering means redistributing CDROMs all over again, and having to
deal with the added support costs and possible downtime complaints that
would be related to it.


| It's too late for me to do the math, but if everyone had an unaggregated
| /48 the routing tables would beyond what technology, irregardless of
| money, could accomodate.

I know the math.  I did it well over a decade ago when I dabbled in some
designs for highly scalable routing which would not involve keeping every
prefix or even AS in a table in each router.


| In regards to having customers demanding certain terms in a contract, my
| proposed revisions would guarantee you the same IPs until 2007.  I do not
| know your business, so I could be wrong, but I know pulling teeth is
| easier than getting customers to sign a contract beyond 3 years.  My
| proposal gives you almost 4 years.  Most likely beyond a contract length.

I'm setting this business up on IPv4 now.  I don't have permanent address
space, so I have to plan for potential changes, which will be disruptive in
the way things work.  I don't anticipate those changes would happen very
often, and if things stay on IPv4, probably not even before 2007.  What you
are offering is simply nothing better than IPv4.

By 2007, I don't expect that many of my customers can transition to IPv6
anyway, because it would be a matter of their upstreams.  Of course I could
do IPv6 inside VPNs with the customers, but I can do that with 10.X.X.X now
so again, IPv6 offers me nothing.


| As far as setting up dialup pools to be able to justify a /19...
| 
| 1) Would ARIN give you IP space based on that?  I don't remember that
|    being a criteria.

Think of it this way.  What I do now wouldn't need more than /26 on my end.
Remember, I'm not allocating space to my customers at all as they will be
operating out of various other provider space.


| 2) If they would, I believe ARIN would give you a /20 not a /19.  Not that
|    it matters much.

Not likely, since I'd truthfully I only need a tiny portion of it.  The dialup
would be a side business for nothing more than to ensure address space usage.


| 3) Setting up a dialup pool takes time as well, and money to maintain.
|    Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to renumber if the need
|    were to arise?

I think you still misunderstand the picture.  You're still thinking of the
renumbering as just changing the numbers on my machines and DNS entries and
going again.  But my services will involve my DNS servers being referenced
by systems automatically installed by CDROMs.  I'd have to have my customers
receive a new CDROM with the new numbers and re-install again.


| I'm curious though... I went to your website.  You mention that you
| provide ISDN, DSL, etc.  Are you reselling someone else's services?  If
| not, wouldn't you qualify for a /32 of IPv6 space under my revisions?

That's not the new business.  That's just a consultancy I've been running
for the past few years, and the access services mentioned there are resells
from two partners I work with, one of which even has a /19, going on /18,
already.  The new business will start within their address space, but I
can't multi-home beyond what they multi-home, and my business might grow
beyond them.

While I have registered domains for the new business, and have even set up
two test customers already (which I do not provide or resell access service
to), I'm not sure what the ultimate name will be.  I'm still in discussions
with my new business partner to finish off the business plan, which will
have mention of address portability issues as constraints we have to be
concerned about.

I'm also looking at patching up some software so that I can use domain names
instead of IP addresses.  Certainly my domain names will be fixed.  But will
the root server addresses by fixed over say a 5 to 10 year period?  It is yet
another unfortunate technical aspect of the design of either IPv4 or IPv6
that addresses of root DNS servers were not fixed into the design.  Maybe it's
not too late to do that with IPv6.  That would be an alternative that could
work for me.  Otherwise my alternative will be based on stability of either
my DNS server or the root servers.

-- 
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| Phil Howard - KA9WGN |   Dallas   | http://linuxhomepage.com/ |
| phil-nospam at ipal.net | Texas, USA | http://ka9wgn.ham.org/    |
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