If you don't mind some comments from a person a little separated from Europe (but you did mention world-wide): JPNIC and APNIC have recieved many requests for addresses for very small numbers of hosts (e.g. 2 or 3). This is a result of firewalls apparently being more popular in this region than elsewhere. In addition, I believe there have been requests to JPNIC from individuals for address space for similar situations as you have experienced. The response to these requests have generally been the allocation of a single class C network. I personally feel it would be highly useful if sub-C allocations were allowed from within service provider address space (only - renumbering individual sites is obviously trivial) in order to get higher address space utilization rates. I'm supposed to be writing a proposal for JPNIC to address this very issue, but I seem to have lost my copious spare time... Cheers, -drc --------
Local IRs,
I planned to attend the Local IR WG meeting at RIPE last Tuesday, but the meeting was moved to yesterday, the same time as the Mbone WG meeting (where I had to be for "chairing reasons"). And I forgot all about it...
As Last Resort IR for The Netherlands I received a request for address space (one C network) from an individual. The person requesting address space tells me he has several machines at home able to talk IP and he wants to interconnect them.
Since he has plans to connect his LAN at home to the Internet some day in the future he asks for an official IP network number (which means RFC1597 is of no help in this case).
IMHO, this is a question which we will see in an increasingly frequency in the near future. Think of what happens if IP functionality is built in to Microsoft software...
I'd like to know whether you have received requests like this before, and how you aproached this issue, since I think "we all" should have a common attitude in Europe (better: world-wide) on this.
Thanks for your concern.
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Erik-Jan.