[ppml] Legacy and other IPV4 recovery

[Cliff Bedore]

Having just been invited to join this discussion group as one of the "legacy"
Class C net owners, I've been reading a lot of messages lately about
recovering unused IP addresses.  I have several comments/questions about the
effectiveness of doing this.  I don't have the long history of this group so
forgive me if I state something covered before.

First, given that ISP's who have been allocated addresses by ARIN are more
likely to be using/have some justification for retaining their address
allocations, it would seem that most successful recovery would come from the
legacy allocations that went to companies who for some reason no longer use
their addresses.  It also seems to me that the larger allocations from the
"legacy" period would be more likely to still be active and most of the
recovery would be from the early Class C allocations.  It would also seem
likely that it would be difficult to recover contiguous blocks of Class C
address space.

Given all those assumptions to be true and understanding that routing to
non-contiguous Class C addresses can clog router address tables, would the
recovery of all these addresses and subsequent re-issue in fact cause more
harm than good because the router table growth?  

Also from a personal curiousity point of view, in reading this group, it seems
that all legacy numbers were assigned to ARIN.  Is this true and if not, how
does one find out where all the individual Class C addresses are physically
located?  If some are, in fact. located outside ARIN's domain, how would they
(ARIN) be able to do any recovery if such addresses were found?

Without the long (to me at least) history of the group, I don't know if this
has been discussed but am curious about the validity of my assumptions above
and what would be the impact on recovery effectiveness if they are true?

For some background, my Class C was issued in 1990 and for a while was not
connected but has been since 1992-3 or so connected via dialup and then DSL
via a series of ISPs.  Therefore I don't have any routing complexity myself
and am covered by my ISPs ASN.

Cliff
-- 
Cliff Bedore
7403 Radcliffe Dr. College Park MD 20740
cliffb at cjbsys.bdb.com http://www.bdb.com
Amateur Radio Call Sign W3CB For info on ham radio, http://www.arrl.org/