Leo Vegoda had a good post on this same topic over on the APNIC list that may answer your question: On Mon 8/16/2010 10:54 AM, Leo Vegoda wrote:
Hi Philip,
On 16 Aug 2010, at 4:37, Philip Smith wrote:
[...]
5.1 Reclamation Pool
Upon adoption of this IPv4 address policy by the ICANN Board of Directors, the IANA shall establish a Reclamation Pool to be utilized post RIR IPv4 exhaustion as defined in Section 4. The reclamation pool will initially contain any fragments that may be left over in IANA inventory. I understood that IANA was exhausting its entire pool. Or is exhaustion really just complete /8s? It would be helpful if someone from IANA could clarify as I was under the impression that remaining fragments would be distributed as well, certainly before IANA declared that the cupboard was bare. The remaining fragments are not insignificant. I can't speak for the authors but I can describe what we "have in stock" and what the ratified policies allows us to do. The only IPv4 address blocks we have with an UNALLOCATED status are whole /8s. Further, the current policy we implement only allows us to allocate /8s:
" * The IANA will allocate IPv4 address space to the RIRs in /8 units." -- http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-IPv4-rirs.html
Similarly, the policy for allocating the last blocks required that they be allocated in /8s, too:
"IANA will automatically allocate the reserved IPv4 allocation units to each RIR (one /8 to each one)" -- http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-remaining-ipv4-space.htm
My personal interpretation of the text above was the the "Reclamation Pool" would only be a potential pool unless and until one of the RIRs found that they no longer needed the IPv4 address space they were recovering and could return it to IANA for re-distribution. If I've misunderstood the authors' intentions I am sure that they will correct me.
Kind regards,
Leo Vegoda * sig-policy: APNIC SIG on resource management policy * _______________________________________________ sig-policy mailing list sig-policy@lists.apnic.net http://mailman.apnic.net/mailman/listinfo/sig-policy
On Mon 8/30/2010 2:22 PM, Chris Grundemann wrote:
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 14:51, Tore Anderson <tore.anderson@redpill-linpro.com> wrote:
The proposal says the following: «The reclamation pool will initially contain any fragments that may be left over in IANA inventory».
You didn't comment on it in your first reply, but if these fragments indeed are the unused space in the legacy /8s (I don't know what else they could be), the initial contents of the RP would be some 125.4M addresses, according to Geoff Huston's IPv4 Address Report (http://ipv4.potaroo.net/). That's a sizable chunk... It certainly is.
When this topic came up in our initial conversations, we asked an IANA representative about fragments and were told that IANA did not currently have any. My understanding is that this may be due to a deal that was struck between the IANA and the NRO - but I do not have any authoritative information on that at this time.
Geoff Huston's report states that: "At the time IANA reaches the last 5 /8s (the "IANA Exhaustion time" as defined by current address allocation policies), these unassigned addresses in the legacy /8s are then distributed evenly to the RIRs." I am not sure where this information came from though, since this is not spelled out in the "Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space" policy (http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-remaining-ipv4-space.htm) as far as I can discern.
And of course the IANA report (http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml) shows all of the "various/legacy" /8s as being administered by individual RIRs, since it only has a /8 granularity.
So there is some confusion (on my part at least) as to where these fragments currently reside and who has responsibility for them. Perhaps if someone from IANA monitors this list they can chime in? If not, I and the other authors will certainly be following up to iron these fairly significant details out. I apologize for not having a more complete answer.
Someone else can likely provide more detail, but my understanding is that the various /16s in legacy swamp space (the "various/legacy" listings there) are all allocated to (or administered by) individual RIRs, and they're just listed that way because the IANA list doesn't show anything more granular than a /8. So, as far as I can tell, the reclamation pool would initially be empty, unless/until someone returned something smaller than a /8 to IANA. -Scott