[ppml] 2003-5 rwhois/reassignment info

[jlewis at lewis.org]

On Wed, 7 May 2003, Einar Bohlin wrote:

> I understand that there are good faith blacklisters,
> but if things change for them, I'm sure they could
> adapt.  If utilization info is public these days solely
> or primarily for blacklisters, then ISPs have to talk
> about why utilization info is public.  All this
> effort by ISPs to create public utilization info is
> to support blacklisting?

No...that's just one group that relies heavily on it.  Abuse related 
issues are the primary reason that comes to my mind though.  Forgetting 
about DNSBLs for a moment, here are a few more examples supporting public 
reassignment info.

Suppose you have some spam or other abuse (hacking/attacking) issue with
an IP belonging to one of "the big providers"...just for example, we'll
say UUNet.  Without public reassignment info, you'll have to send your
complaint to UUNet's (overloaded) abuse address, where it will surely be
delayed if not discarded.  With public reassignment info, you can send it
to the smaller ISP customer of UUNet and at least know that the
appropriate people got it, or perhaps even just call them on the phone.  
Why hide them behind UUNet?

Suppose some small network comes to you to buy a redundant connection and
wants you to propogate a BGP route for their UUNet PA IP space.  Do you
trust the customer to not lie about their IP space?  Do you call UUNet,
wade through their phone menus, and try to find someone who will talk to a
non-customer and verify one of their customer's IP assignments, or would
you rather just check with whois and see that the space is swipped to the
customer?

> That's not going to happen.  The trend is that
> ISPs are covering their customers, being the POC for
> reassigned nets.  It makes sense, contacting the cust
> POC was mostly futile anyway.  And I see that ARIN is

That depends on the customer.  Lots of smaller nets have no technical 
people on staff, and so even if you do get through on the phone, they may 
not understand why you're bothering them.  I would hope that most ISP 
networks do have technical people on staff and there's no reason to make 
it harder to contact them.  Would you rather abolish public reassignment 
entirely and make ARIN the POC for all the address space they allocate?  
Just send everything to abuse at arin.net and let them sort it out?

> I'm truly glad we don't have to swip /30s, especially
> the point to point nets.  But what about the customer
> who gets the /30 as you say for a firewall/NAT?  Why
> do they get special anonymity?  Why is the cutoff /29, 
> and not, for example, /19?  I'm serious.
> 
> By the way, APNIC requires swip for /29 and larger nets,
> just like ARIN, but at APNIC /32 to /30 are optional.

I'd be real happy with that.  As I said, letting us swip /30's would
seriously reduce the size and complexity of our additional space requests.  
In my last one, there were lots of subnets where I had to arbitrarily make
up a use category.  i.e. there are lots of networks we've marked as
reserved and then subnetted into /30's for customer connections or
router/firewall pairs.  Often, these networks include a collection of
/30's for customers in different cities on different service types.  ARIN
wants all non-swipped assignments categorized as one of
dial|isdn|web|leased|dsl|colo|wireless and some other categories that
never apply to us and I've left out.  How do you categorize a /24 that's a
mix of /30 backbone router PTP interfaces, customer serial interfaces, and
router/firewall ethernets for ISDN, DSL, and leased line customers??
If the answer is, show each assignment individually, then just let us swip 
them.

> Right now we do a swip for every net.  What if there
> was an approved text format, and then you'd be able to mail
> or web input that for utilization, weekly, monthly or whatever?
> That's aside from whether the info is public or not.

They already accept a text format via email.  If you have some automated 
system that would submit a text format to ARIN, you could just as easily 
have it generate and submit in the ARIN-REASSIGN-SIMPLE-3.0 format.

> range from them.  APNIC naturally wants all your swips
> (inetnums) up to date.  But then very interestingly, they
> wanted a text file of all reassignments, in a specified
> format, every single one.  It wasn't that hard to do.
> But it did make me wonder why we did all the inetnums
> in the first place.

Did you ask them why they want you to submit all the info twice (via 
inetnums and a text file)?  That seems like a waste of time/effort.

> One last thing, utilization info could always be 
> public, regardless of the authorized by ARIN
> method, if the ISP wanted it to be that way.

All but a few possible exceptions will choose not to unless forced to.  
Why spend the time and money making the info available if you're not
required to?

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