lowering maximum assignment window

Hi all, 

Below is my original message with a proposal to lower the maximum 
assignment window to a /21 instead of a /19.

There was much discussion about this on the lir-wg mailing list. Here 
is our final proposal that tries to take all the comments into 
consideration:

All registries that currently have a /20 or /19 assignment window will 
be at a rotating interval (doing them all at once would put too much of 
a load on an already large wait queue) set to a /23 assignment window 
temporarily. They will then need to start sending a few requests to 
show that they understand the assignment policies and procedures. If 
these requests are fine, we will raise their assignment window to a 
size that matches the requests we have seen from them (therefore not 
necessarily to a /19). Hopefully this will get these registries on an 
equal footing with other LIRs. The reason we need to review the 
assignment window for all of these registries is that they started out 
with a /19 assignment window in the beginning of the RIPE NCC. Whereas 
younger registries started out with a 0 assignment window and have 
since then proven that they can handle assignents of a certain size and 
have therefore had their assignment window raised. For all of the 
younger registries we already have a procedure in place of doing random 
audits and we will continue doing this.

By the way, one of the results of this discussion was that Poul-Henning 
Kamp wrote a script that checks for inconsistencies between addresses 
that are in use but are not registrered in the RIPE database. These 
statistics can be found at: http://stat.cybercity.dk/ripe/

Please check this page for your own registry ID to see whether your 
registry has any inconsistencies to fix. Of course the RIPE NCC will 
also be contacting the Registries with the largest list of 
inconsistenceis as well, but we don't have the resources to 
systematically contact every registry on the list.

Kind regards,

Paula Caslav
RIPE NCC


------- Forwarded Message

Date:     Wed, 10 Feb 1999 14:41:17 +0100
From:     Paula Caslav <paula at ripe.net>
Sender:   owner-lir-wg at ripe.net
To:       lir-wg at ripe.net
Subject:  lowering maximum assignment window


Hi all,

As we discussed in our audit report at the Local IR working group at
the RIPE 32 meeting, we would like to propose a change in the maximum
assignment window that a Registry can have. Currently an assignment
window for a Registry can be anything between a 0 and a /19. The /19
assignment window, is a historical legacy. 

These Registries were for the most part free to assign up to 8192
addresses to a customer without coming to the RIPE NCC for
approval. Since some of them are still operating as Local Registries,
and they still have a /19 assignment window, this means that we have
very little contact with them and we have seen in doing audits on
these Registries that many of them are out of date with the procedures
for assigning IP addresses, and using the database. We also notice
that most of them do not really use this large assignment window
fully- meaning that most of their assignments are smaller. The router
technology has changed much in the last few years, which means that
assignments to customers in general are much smaller.

Given the fact that most Registries rarely make such large
assignments, and the fact that having such a large assignment window
makes it easy for them to lose touch with the RIPE NCC policies, we
would like to propose having a lower maximum assignment window. We
think a /21 maximum assignment window would be more
reasonable. 

Actually for most Registries, a /24 or /23 assignment window is
enough, since they rarely make larger assignments than that. However,
for the Registries that make more large customer assignments, having
up to a /21 assignment window would allow them room to make most of
these larger assignment without coming to us for approval.

Please think about this proposal and give us any comments by the end of 
next week.

Kind regards,

Paula Caslav
Registration Services Manager
RIPE NCC




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