Re: Draft: PI addressing derived from AS numbers

[Pekka Savola <pekkas@netcore.fi>]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Pekka Savola wrote:
> 
> > It ends at AS32768.
> 
> Any particular reason why we should leave 31744 perfectly good AS
> numbers unused?

Because I don't want a proposal like this exhaust the 16bit AS number 
space.
 
> > > What's the alternative? Say to the 64511th person to request an AS
> > > number we're all out?
> 
> > There are still over 2^15 AS numbers to waste.  Considerably more, less
> > than a half of about 29K AS numbers are actually even being used..
> 
> Try to reclaim them... That's very hard.

Agreed, but that's what should be done before declaring loss.
 
> > Long-term solution: make a better policy for doling them out; avoid
> > advocating situations where you (unnecessarily) need one.
> 
> This is not "the internet way"! Paying people to go through complex
> request procedures and then paying other people to review those request
> means wasting money twice. If we're going to waste money anyway, let's
> waste it on bigger hardware and smarter protocols, not on bureaucracy.

The question is where an AS number would be used.  If the 16bit number was
too low for all ISP's etc., sure .. but I'm not really convinced that's 
the case, especially if v4 multihoming is eliminated.

Also, sometimes using ASN's seems to be unnecessary, something you could
very well avoid altogether or replace with private AS numbers.
 
> BTW, the fact that you don't see an ASN in your tables doesn't mean it
> isn't legitimately used. For instance, most of you will not see AS12945.
> It is used to peer over the AMS-IX, but in order not to contribute to
> the global routing table unnecessarily we have our stuff aggregated by
> the upstream.

Yes, there are cases like this.. but often these are also ones where a
(public) AS number would not really be strictly necessary.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings