I am personally in favor of closing down the last resource registry (one reason is of course that it is starting to take up a serious amount of resources for us :-(). BUT documentation is in that case indeed hardly needed since some "callers" are rather agressive, and in that case it is usefull to point them to a general available document. Stephan Daniel Karrenberg wrote :
Last-Resort local IRs have been established to serve end-users who do not have access to another local IR either because they do not connect to the Internet yet or because Internet service providers were not yet providing registry services.
Recently the introduction of route aggregation (CIDR) and the proliferation of local IRs operated by service providers greatly reduce the usefulness of Last-Restort local IRs. Even worse, the routing of non-aggregatable address space negatively impacts the Internet routing system. Such space either is or shortly will be less then useful for the end-user because they have to renumber when connecting. Also there is now private address space available for use of end-users who want address space that is guaranteed not to be used by another end-user on the Internet.
Additionally the Last-Resort registries form an anomaly in the RIPE NCC charging system, because they do not contribute to NCC funding while using NCC resources.
Consequently it has been proposed several times already to close down the Last-Resort registries. I think it is now time to finally take such a step with a timeframe of end Q3/95 or at the end of the year.
Are there any serious problems with this step?
Daniel
-- Stephan Biesbroeck Tel: +32(0)2-2383470 stephan@belnet.be Fax: +32(0)2-2311531 Service Support Team of the Belgian National Research Network, BELNET