Hi guys

I'm either having a deja vu moment or I've had this conversation with someone recently. The policy wording here can be interpreted in different ways.

"Sub-allocations are intended to aid the goal of routing aggregation and can only be made from allocations with a status of "ALLOCATED PA".

This could mean that the sub allocation must be one level more specific to the allocation resource object. But that may not make sense. A global organisation may want to use 'LIR-PARTITIONED PA' to split a resource allocation between national subsidiaries from which they may wish to make sub allocations.

However, this wording may also mean that a sub allocation must be made within a hierarchy where the less specific resource object has the status of 'ALLOCATED PA' rather than 'ALLOCATED PI' or 'ALLOCATED UNSPECIFIED', but the sub allocation is not constrained to be only one level more specific to the allocation object. So that would allow for a hierarchy of several levels of sub allocations and partitions.

cheers
denis

co-chair DB-WG


On Tuesday, 16 June 2020, 15:57:51 CEST, Sascha Luck [ml] <apwg@c4inet.net> wrote:


On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 03:36:39PM +0200, Petrit Hasani wrote:
>Section 5.3 "Sub-allocations" of the IPv4 Address Allocation and Assignment Policies (ripe-733) states:
>
>"Sub-allocations are intended to aid the goal of routing aggregation and can only be made from allocations with a status of "ALLOCATED PA".
>
>[...]
>
>LIRs may make sub-allocations to multiple downstream network operators."
>
>https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-733#54
>
>Before making any changes, we want to be sure that we understand the intent of the policy and what the community wants us to do. Thus, we would like to hear from the Address Policy Working Group:
>
>- Should inetnums with these statuses be allowed to be created inside one another?
I think that may be useful, yes, especially for IPv6 allocations
which give far more scope for suballocations, and the use-case
obviously exists.

>- Should there be a limit on the minimum size of a sub-allocation?
Not for IPv4, *maybe* for IPv6. I don't think there is scope in
IPv4 for administrative address wasteage. It may be sensible in
IPv6 to prevent deaggregation of allocations into unmanageable bits
and database blowout.


>- Do we need a policy update?

Yes, I think so. Policy is relatively unambiguous in stating that
only one level of sub-allocation is allowed and if there is a
desire to change this, the PDP should be required..

rgds,
Sascha Luck