A Question

My personal thoughts about this:

As a LIR technician you should know:  This is perfectly legal because
inescapable.  According to RIPE regulations, you have to return your
addresses when you drop the connection to a LIR.  Only addresses which can
be reached from Internet directly may continue to exist and PA addresses
from another ISP are never reachable from Internet.  As the addresses are PA
and not PI you have to renumber your network.  The customer has to be made
aware of this fact by the LIR.  In case the customer wasn't informed about
this fact that changing the uplink provider means to change IPs too, this is
a problem between the old uplink and the customer and not about the new
uplink, as the new uplink cannot be held responsible for errors somebody
other did.

This even holds in case that the customer has 2 or more independent Internet
connections.  In this case the customer should switch to BGP4 and do
following:

a) Get some PI address space.  I cannot recommend this as PI address space
is not as good as PA and you cannot be sure that all ISPs in the world
accept announcements with a higher prefix than /20.  From reachability point
of view PI addresses are definitively a problem if you care about the fact
that one might have to provide best possible service to the customers.  If
you can ignore that perhaps you cannot reach some weird edges in asia or so,
then take PI, but be sure to get a least a /24 block.  I know someone myself
who is happy with his /23 PI block.  And with PI you never have to renumber
if you change your uplink.

b) Get some PA address space and redistribute it into BGP4.  I cannot
recommend this as PA addresses have the problem that many ISPs filter them
according to the routing database.  And I as a BGP4 sysop would ignore
smaller aggregations in routing entries, as they are redundant or maybee an
error.  As a result the IPs don't take the shortest path back to the
customer which may lead to higher costs at the customer's side.  Besides the
higher costs redistributing PA into BGP4 should have no bad sideeffect (or
am I not aware of something?).  In Europe the possibly higher imposed cost
factor is so extreme, that I definitively can only discourage from using PA
for BGP4 redistribution (in case you have M uplinks it my be that you have M
times the traffic price when M-1 of your uplink lines go down).  Another bad
fact is that with PA you have to renumber when you drop the link to the LIR
which issued the IPs.

c) Become your own LIR.  I can recommed this in case that you go multihomed
with your own AS and don't want to renumber any more in future.  Note that
this is exactly what I am currently doing here ;)

OK, that's my opinion, but I am no lawyer.

-Tino
PS: I send this to the list even that I read the other posts ;)

----- Original Message -----
From: "SAEED KHADEMI" <saeed at vax.ipm.ac.ir>
To: <local-ir at ripe.net>
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2001 9:28 AM
Subject: A Question


> [ Moderator note: changed local-ir at ripe.net -> lir-wg at ripe.net ]
>
>
> Hello,
>  Dear coleagues, Please excuse me if this is not the right place for
> this kind of questions.
>  I am working as a LIR hostmaster since 5 years ago. Due to the act of
> people of another LIR, a question has rised in my mind. And I want to
> know about any defined regulation in this regard.
>  The Question:
>
>  Is it legal that technical persons of one LIR, ask their customer to
> return other LIR assignments, because the customer has asked for new
> IP assignment?
>  This has been accured many times. Customer having some IP assignments
> from LIR-1, are applying for new IP assignments from LIR-2. But people
> at LIR-2 are saying that if you want new IP assignments, you HAVE TO
> return LIR-1 assignments !!!!!!!
>
>  Any comment?
>
> Kind Regards,
> IPM LOCAL REGISTRY, Tehran/Iran
> Saeed.
>
>
>