US CODE: Title 15, Chapter 1, Section 2.

[Michael Dillon]

On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:

> I fully agree many of the issues here are more NANOG/IEPG. Unfortunately,
> as you suggest, a significant number of participants here either don't know
> of those groups, or don't understand the relationship between ARIN and
> NANOG/IEPG.

If those people are ISP's then they have got to find the time to learn
these things. There is plenty of material on NANOG at http://www.nanog.org
and there is some amount of info available on IEPG at http://www.iepg.org
Both groups are informal, both have mailing lists, both have regular 
face-to-face meetings (IEPG generally in conjunction with IETF).

Of course many ISP's will claim that they have fulltime jobs already and
just don't know where to find the time to learn all this stuff and
participate in these discussions and meetings. However, every one of the
proposed ARIN Board of Trustees also has a full time job and has to
commit some of their personal time to getting ARIN off the ground.
Volunteer work and non-profit organizations tend to go hand in hand.

> My intuition
> is that aggregation is probably best served if the medical group gets a /24
> assigned from Provider A space, with prior agreement from Provider B that
> Provider B will advertise the specific hole from Provider A space, if and
> only if the customer-to-A link is lost and the customer intelligently
> starts advertising the /24 to Provider B.

PIARA take note. If provider B were to charge an additional sum of money
to the medical group for carrying the hole-punch route then this would
tend to be self-regulating. I know some PIARA people want to see wholesale
route charging but in the real world a small experiment is usually the
wiser course to take. And if anyone here doesn't know what PIARA is or
what they have proposed to do, have a look through
ftp://archive.apnic.net/mailing-lists/piara/
but remember, it's only an idea and if you don't like something about it
you would do best to take it up on the list itself. Send your subscribe
request to piara-request at apnic.net and don't be surprised if there's not
much traffic.

And if you want to talk about what an IP registry SHOULD be doing, the IRE
list, now renamed PAGAN is archived at
ftp://archive.apnic.net/mailing-lists/pagan/
and you can join by sending your subscribe message to
pagan-request at apnic.net

> Now -- this is a real world problem.  I haven't even scratched issues like
> attempts to load balance, having >2 providers, etc.  I'm sure that if this
> were discussed in detail, there would be many more complexities.

You might want to take this up in the IEPG or on the NANOG list.

> If you are uncomfortable pointing out
> the strengths and weaknesses of this off-the-top-of-my-head example, I
> respectfully suggest you have some homework to do before assuming that
> other than technical factors are involved in the allocation & routing
> policies here.

Yes. And the material required to do the homework is readily available on
the net. Especially now that we have services like
http://www.altavista.digital.com to make it easy to find things.


Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com