more specific routes in today reality

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 07:19:35AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
>> We are talking about different types of multihoming. I mean simple
>> multihoming situation when all multihomed customer's needs in routing are
>> covered by they upstream providers routing policies.
>                                                    ^
>note the use of plural above.  now read rfc 1930.

Randy, rfc1930 consists of 563 lines. I suppose you are talking about:

line 287:
    *   Unique routing policy

        An AS is only needed when you have a routing policy which is
        different from that of your border gateway peers. Here routing
        policy refers to how the rest of the Internet makes routing
        decisions based on information from your AS. See "Sample
        Cases" below to see exactly when this criteria will apply.
line 323:
   *    Multi-homed site

        Here multi-homed is taken to mean a prefix or group of prefixes
        which connects to more than one service provider (i.e. more than
        one AS with its own routing policy). It does not mean a network
        multi-homed running an IGP for the purposes of resilience.

        An AS is required; the site's prefixes should be part of a
        single AS, distinct from the ASes of its service providers.
        This allows the customer the ability to have a different repre-
        sentation of policy and preference among the different service
        providers.

        This is ALMOST THE ONLY case where a network operator should
        create its own AS number. In this case, the site should ensure
        that it has the necessary facilities to run appropriate routing
        protocols, such as BGP4.

Also I think we should pay attention to rfc1930 header:

line 10:	
Category: Best Current Practice
line 11:
                                                              March 1996
line 14:
          Guidelines for creation, selection, and registration
                      of an Autonomous System (AS)


Lets make some logick based on hypotetical situation with ISP (LIR) Network 
Engineer, Regional Internet Registry and the customer. 
ISP customer wants to be multihomed mostly for the following reason - 
resilience in the case of upstream failure (for my experience - on of the most 
common reasons). Yes, customer already tried to change:
	- ISP, 
	- equipment, 
	- technical staff.
But hadn't reached enough resilience level. They technical and marketing staff 
considered that without multihoming they can't achieve sufficient resilience 
level. They don't ready to pay for Enterprise LIR because they know about PI.
They asked ISP to help them to obtain PI block and AS num. With ISP Network
Engineer assistance they filled in ripe-219. Network Engineer sent it to 
Regional Internet Registry.

After some amount of time Regional Internet Registry staff replied to original
request with something like:

"They are aware that they can be multihomed with only PA space?  Two or more
LIRs can announce these address spaces if you discuss it with them, they don't  
even need an AS number. I don't quite understand why they feel the need to have 
PI space and all the problems that this will cause them.  In addition if they   
ever have plans to expand in the future and need more address space they are    
going to have more trouble.  I would suggest that you discuss this with them    
to see if they still want PI space.  Finally, we are strict regarding the       
actual amounts of address space that customers request as there is a tendency   
to ask for more than is actually required, due to their agregation concerns."

Lets imagine, that all customer uplinks are not against from such solution 
(there isn't any public IX-es, Telecom's, etc).

After that please take a look at quoted lines from rfc1930. 

Who is reponsible for IP address space and AS-num allocation in LIR 
geographical region? RIR. 

If 
	- RIR decided that multihomed customer (generaly) don't need 
	  separate AS-num
	- RIR routing database contains 17% of route objects with more 
	  than one origin (while rfc1930 defines it as exceptions)

should Network Engineer think that:

	1. Covered in rfc1930 "Best Practice" is a little bit outdated?
	2. Meanings of "Multi-homed site", "Unique routing policy" and 
	   "resilenece" terms had been changed since 1996? 
	3. Something else?

-- 
Regards,
Vladimir.