ARIN Proposal

[Jeremiah Kristal]

On Wed, 22 Jan 1997, Stephen Satchell wrote:

> At 8:36 AM 1/22/97, Jerry Scharf wrote:
> >
> >Karl, any of us who have been through one or more area code renumbering
> >instances knows this is not true. It can happen, it does happen, just the
> >Internet has smaller prefixes. Forced by at outside organization to change
> >with no recourse or cost recovery. It just so happens that the people
> >making the decisions are almost always an arm of the state government.
>
> There is another flaw in this analogy:  there is an announcement, a
> parallel-operation period where *both* Area Codes are valid, then the final
> cut-over.  I've been through this a couple of times with Chicago, New
> England, and Bay Area clients.  (I'm also facing this with the idea to
> split Nevada into two area codes -- I'm in Northern Nevada and Clark County
> [Las Vegas/Henderson] run the state, so my area code is sure to change.)
>
> With IP numbers, you don't have any of those options, as I've mentioned in
> what should have been a prior rock.
>
You actually do have these options, or at least options that will provide
the same functionality.  One of the nice things about DNS is that it
operates as an up-to-the-minute directory assistance.  It is also
referenced for almost every internet transaction.  The problem with DNS is
that since it is set up as a distributed, hierarchical system, it is
impossible to make global updates intantly.  The basic work-around is
similiar to permissive dialing in the telco analogy.  It is very easy to
set up more than one IP address on an interface on all current versions of
Unix (at least at that I am aware of) and possible to do it on WinNT.
So, if a customer needs to renumber his workstations from 172.16.100.x to
192.168.100.x, he can set up the ip addresses to the new block and set the
old ip addresses up as secondary addresses.  This does require that the
upstream provider allows the customer to use the old addresses for a short
period of time, generally a week is more than enough time for all DNS
caches to clear.
It's not exactly perfect, but it will work for probably 99% of the cases,
which is probably better than permissive dialing, at least according to
the horror stories on comp.dcom.telecom.tech.  :)

      ________
      \______/                  Jeremiah Kristal
       \____/                   Senior Network Integrator
        \__/                    IDT Internet Services
         \/                     jeremiah at hq.idt.net
                                201-928-4454