On Tue, 5 Feb 2019, Tore Anderson wrote:
* Marco Schmidt
A new RIPE Policy proposal, 2019-02, "Reducing IPv4 Allocations to a /24" is now available for discussion.
This proposal aims to reduce the IPv4 allocation size to a /24 once the RIPE NCC is unable to allocate contiguous /22 ranges.
I support this proposal. Some random thoughts about it:
Hi, Some comments inline:
- It is good to have the policy explicitly say there is a waiting list. Current policy says nothing about this. If the NCC would simply close allocation tickets with «sorry, fresh out, try later», that could encourage LIRs to spam repeated allocation requests in the hope that theirs was the first request to be received after an IPv4 fragment was returned to the allocation pool.
Yes, and that "randomness" would be everything except "fair".
- I don't quite believe that the waiting list would grow indefinitely (regardless of the allocation size being /22 or /24). Keep in mind that only new and IPv4-less LIRs would be able to join the waiting list. Once it is known that simply joining the NCC won't guarantee a /22, but that you'd have to wait for one with no certainty as to how long, I expect that the sign-up rate of new LIRs will drop dramatically (and by extension the amount of LIRs queuing up in the waiting list).
If getting a /24 is still cheaper than getting a /24 from "the market", people will queue up, because there will be still a bit of profit... On a personal viewpoint, i also hope newcomers come to the RIPE NCC for IPv4, so they can be flooded with information about IPv6 :-)
- It seems reasonable to lower the allocation unit to the de facto smallest usable on the public Internet at a point in time when we can no longer allocate /22s (which are already pretty small). Otherwise recovered /23 and /24 fragments (e.g., PI assignments) will just end up rotting away in the NCC inventory, which serves no good purpose at all.
Yes, growing up the NCC's IPv4 inventory will serve noone, except if a policy is accepted in the future to re-open IPv4 distribution, when the inventory reaches some level. I clearly prefer to see /24s distributed to those who want them.
- It seems reasonable to trigger this policy at precisely at a watershed moment like the policy aims to do (unlike 2017-03, which would have changed the rules in the middle of the game).
As you may have noticed i was also one of the co-authors of 2017-03, and that one was withdrawn. But the current proposal is not 2017-03, and i feel this is needed especially after getting input from the NCC about the amount of address space they are getting back -- due to several reasons.
- The authors should clarify how this new policy interacts with the /16 set aside in «5.2 Unforeseen circumstances». In which order does the 5.2 and 5.1bis policies get triggered?
I wouldn't touch that. Would let the NCC decide what are "unforeseen circumstances" or wait for a new, different, policy proposal. We might tackle this issue at v2.0, but i would like to keep changes at a minimum, in this proposal's scope. Best Regards, Carlos
Tore