On 29-mei-2007, at 12:00, Shane Kerr wrote:
It troubles me that so many people are willing to deprive others of something that those others consider useful just because they themselves don't find that thing useful.
If something is not useful to me, but might be useful to others, I generally don't oppose it.
But I do not think ULA central is useful to anyone.
People have come out and said it's useful to them, so you are putting your judgment ahead of theirs.
Even if ULA central is useful, I don't think it is something the RIRs need to be involved in.
On that, we agree.
If you insist on ULA central, my preferred implementation is a web page where you click on a button that says "give me a ULA prefix" and it allocates a random prefix that is not in use, and prints it on the screen. The only implementation question I'm not sure about is whether the list of allocated prefixes would be public or not; I lean towards making it public, although there is a (small) privacy concern. I think the cost of this implementation is low enough you could find a group of volunteers to host the system.
I think a mechanism similar to IEEE MAC addresses would be good: organizations can buy a block for a price that's large enough to cover the costs of maintaining the IANA registry and also high enough to make sure people aren't going to buy unreasonable quantities ($/eu 1000 - 5000 or so for a block of a million /48s seems about right) and then the block holders can then redistribute the individual ULA prefixes in any way they see fit. Presumably, end-users would buy their prefixes from distributors that have a good system for enforcing uniqueness in place, but this can be traded off against other needs.