A Simple Question of Timing

[Michael Dillon]

On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:

> >On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
> >
> >>     If ARIN does not "launch," whatever that means, when will it become
> >> impossible to get new address space (in the "Internic" service area) other
> >> than from the IANA or by assignments from previously allocated blocks?
> >
> >It will never become "impossible" to get IP address space. This is because
> >if the ARIN proposal collapsed and NSI shut down their operation anyway
> >the large NSP's could still make mutual agreements to route IP address
> >blocks from currently unallocated space.
> 
> That's specifically what I meant by "assignments from previously allocated
> blocks."

Except that I said "currently UNallocated space".

> But I doubt that contingency plans are in place to do this immediately. 

It would take a few hours at most to deal with the IP allocations part on
a provisional basis, maybe a day to get the basic business committments
from consortium members and then a week or so for legal agreements to be
drawn up and signed. I don't think any contingency plan is necessary since
the critical time sensitive part is the allocations and it can be handled
on a moment's notice. 

> I cannot help but think that at best, there might be a 30 day or longer
> hiatus for new allocations.

Basically, anyone can allocate space to themselves today and announce it
via BGP and it will work everywhere it is not filtered. If a catastrophe
occurred and people picked a rational allocation scheme like carving up
223/8 into /12's then it wouldn't take a lot to get filters updated. This
is the ultimate catastrophe scenario and it really isn't that scary. It is
far more likely that a failure would have some warning time and that IANA
could enlist the services of APNIC or RIPE to take over for some interim
time period.

> >pretty reasonable and I sense that there are not a whole lot more
> >objections to be overcome before an acceptable structure and bylaws
> >are presented to the community.
> 
> I don't have a problem with this.  While I think there is a lot of flaming
> going on, a certain level will never stop.  I do have concerns I have
> voiced about the proposal and its lack of cost and process detail, but
> these are not show-stoppers.

Yep. I'm sure that the proposed board is not going to release any figures
until they have a pretty strong case to back up each and every line item
in their budget. And not only are the process details moving in the right
direction, but I haven't seen any substantial objections even though I
tried trolling for some issues that I thought could be hot buttons. To me
this indicates that if the issues previously introduced on the list are
dealt with, then ARIN is pretty close to a done deal.

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