[arin-ppml] AFRINIC And The Stability Of The Internet Number Registry System

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <D2B21484-1CF4-49C8-9788-1FCF729DFF4E at delong.com>, 
Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

>... there really isn't
>anywhere else for most of those organizations to go and renumbering such
>massive networks in 90 days is extraordinarily impractical even if it were
>possible.

Are you sure about that "renumbering" part?

>From where I am sitting it appears that about 1.7 million of those 6.2
million IPv4 addresses are running web servers on port 80 and that a
significant number of those, perhaps even a majority, appear to just be
serving up what I would call "cookie cutter" essentially identical content,
reachable only via what looks to me like essentially gibberish domain
names that are being cycled in and out on a frequent basis by someone
anyway.

The remaining 3.5 million IPv4 addresses don't seem to be running anything
that responds to port 80, and I kind-of suspect that a lot of this other
space is being used for proxies, and proxies don't need any forward or
reverse DNS at all, so renumbering those should be a piece of cake.

The bottom line is that the task of renumbering, in general, can be made
really really difficult if one has some reason to wish it so.  I am not
persuaded however that it must be so in this specific case.


Regards,
rfg