Amending RFC 2050 to reflect Enterprise LIRs is a good idea, particularly as Telcos amongst others have valid reasons for operating Enterprise LIRs. However, as previous manager of an Enterprise LIR and my experience of dealing with large corporates as well as ISPs, I see 2 problem areas; 1) converting some organisations too become Enterprise LIRs is appropriate, but they won't be interested in paying the LIR fees. They already have the assignment, so why should they? :-) 2) RIPE (and ARIN & APNIC) database integrity. How accurate are the records of the RIR databases? ISP LIRs are likely to be better than Enterprise LIRs at maintaining their objects and contact information. Perhaps in the 2050 re-write some recommendations as to regular maintenance of objects to ensure accurate, correct and current operational contacts, with yearly or 2 yearly checks by the RIR, and recovery of address assignments from the Last Resort after a period of time, such as 5 years, should be made. There is also the problem that although Enterprise LIRs are mentioned in RIPE-185, definition of them, their scope, and why they are different, isn't so well documented :-) My views do not necessarily reflect my employers :-) Regards, Adrian F Pauling BT Ignite -----Original Message----- From: Peter Emptage [mailto:pemptage@cisco.com] Sent: 14 May 2002 14:32 To: lir-wg Subject: IPv4 Address Allocation policies for organisations not connecting to the Internet There are a limited number or organisations that for legitimate reasons require globally unique address space apart from rfc1918 private address space, but may not connect to or announce these prefixes on the Internet. Rfc 2050 referenced such situations as seen in the extract below. On a case by case basis, it may be appropriate for these few organisations to become LIRs. Perhaps the IPv4 Address Allocation policy should reference such circumstances as rfc 2050 did? Peter Emptage Senior Consulting Engineer Cisco Systems rfc 2050 extract section 3a Assignment Framework An assignment is the delegation of authority over a block of IP addresses to an end enterprise. The end enterprise will use addresses from an assignment internally only; it will not sub- delegate those addresses. This section discusses some of the issues involved in assignments and the framework behind the assignment of addresses. In order for the Internet to scale using existing technologies, use of regional registry services should be limited to the assignment of IP addresses for organizations meeting one or more of the following conditions: a) the organization has no intention of connecting to the Internet-either now or in the future-but it still requires a globally unique IP address. The organization should consider using reserved addresses from RFC1918. If it is determined this is not possible, they can be issued unique (if not Internet routable) IP addresses.