[arin-ppml] Ending point to point links as a justification for a /30?

[Owen DeLong]

On Jul 29, 2010, at 7:04 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Richard A Steenbergen
> <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:49:27AM -1000, William Herrin wrote:
>>> 
>>> Okay, so let's forget writing policy to this at the moment. Absent any
>>> policy change, would anybody encourage/object to the ARIN board
>>> issuing an open letter to the routing vendors to the effect of:
>>> 
>>> "As you know, we're running out of IPv4 addresses. To help mitigate
>>> the shortage, we respectfully ask you to implement features in your
>>> software which enable and encourage your customers to employ RFC1918
>>> IP addresses within their routing infrastructure. Such features might
>>> include:
>>> 
>>> icmp-response interface loopback0
>>> 
>>> Originate ICMP warnings and errors for packets received on this
>>> interface using the IP address assigned to Loopback0.
>> 
>> There is this little tool out there called "traceroute", you might have
>> heard of it. Some of us like it, as it helps keep the Internet running.
>> Please don't encourage people to break it just to try and save a handful
>> of IP addresses.
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
> One of us misunderstands the situation. Let's back up and talk about
> how traceroute works, the character of the problem encountered when
> traceroutes are attempted via routers configured with RFC1918
> addresses and how the proposed technology attempts to address the
> problem.
> 
Actually, I have had to debug a number of problems where not getting
a link-specific address back in a traceroute is quite the opposite of
helpful. Often when one is troubleshooting with traceroute, you need
to know not only which router was responsible for a particular hop, but,
on which interface the packets entered said router. Parallel paths between
two routers are but one example where this could matter.

As such, I'd argue that Richard is the one who better understands the
situation.

Owen