[address-policy-wg] Policy Change Request - Allow address allocations for anycast DNS operation

Hi,

as the discussion seems to have ebbed down, let me try to summarize.
Please correct me if this isn't fully correct.

There have been a few comments about wording, to make the criteria
more precise.

There has been some confusion on whether this is "PI".  It is not, it's
"anycast space", and should be tagged as such in the database, to help
people recognizing these special blocks immediately as such.  The usual
rules apply: "if the criteria for allocations do no longer apply, the
address block should be returned" (even if that is unlikely to happen
very often in practice).

There has been the question whether an operator can only get one
prefix, or multiple prefixes.  I have amended the proposal to 
include the option for multiple prefixes, but also point out that
the usual thing will be "only one (set)".  This is meant as kind of 
guidance - "deploy one set, and if that's well understood and
you want to deploy another set, feel free to come back".

Along that lines, there has been some confusion about redundancy.  An
important clarification is that it's not expected to put *all* nameservers
into the (single) anycast prefix, but have "unicast" servers and one
(or "few") anycast sets.  So if the anycast prefix is unavailable from
some networks, clients will fall back to one of the unicast servers.

There has been a question on whether "end users" can directly request
anycast address space, and the suggestion is that it should be handled
the same way as PI space and AS space: the request needs to be passed
through an existing LIR.

One comment asked for "do we really need yet another special rule here",
and my reply would be "the current PA and PI policy doesn't permit doing
this without lying to the NCC", *and* DNS is really special here due to
protocol constraints.


To my understanding, there were no real fundamental objections, though
(besides, this proposal was already discussed on the list and in the
APWG meeting at R47, with mostly neutral-to-positive reactions)


So based on these comments, I want to suggest the following new 
text, to be incorporated into the policy documents:

------------ snip ------------
"Operators providing DNS for a zone served by a number of name servers 
such that the total response size when including the list of 
nameservers for the zone is close to the UDP packet size limit may 
be assigned dedicated network prefixes for the sole purpose of 
anycasting name servers, as described on RFC 3258. These shall be: 
a /24 IPv4 prefix and/or a /32 IPv6 prefix per anycast server set,
which will usually only be one per operator.  The prefixes shall be 
tagged as 'ASSIGNED ANYCAST' in the RIPE database and should be 
returned to the RIPE NCC if not in use for anycast DNS any longer."
------------ snip ------------


To be able to proceed with the implementation, let's set a deadline
of July 13 (4 weeks from now).  If no fundamental opposition is voiced,
we can call it consensus, and ask the RIPE NCC to go ahead with it.


Gert Doering
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