[lir-wg] Discussion about RIPE-261

On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 03:42:28PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 03:03:24PM +0200, Andre Oppermann wrote:
> > Can anyone tell me why an IP address should be geograhically
> > significant in this way? Doesn't this open a can of worms of
> > potential abuse all over the place?
> 
> One motivation I can see for it is to permit more-specific announcements
> inside a region (because it's interesting to find "the shortest way"
> to the destination network) but to summarize the routing information
> "from the outside".
> 

So it should be a topological distinction, not geographical. If the
Internet has taught us something so far it's geo space means *nothing*. 
Traffic from USA to Africa will likely go through Europe and in some cases
be under EU IP space. However, in other cases with will be under ARIN IP
space and go directly to Africa. 
How does that work with summarizing based on geo region ? 
Closer to home, I may have a LINX peering with Foo ISP but not
with Bar ISP so my traffic goes Europe -> US West -> Europe. I am 4000km
from both and they are spaced 20m. 

> For us, as a small german ISP, it's not really important who is hooked
> up where in the US or in the AP region - so a summary route "all this
> stuff is in the US, send this to our upstream" (simplified) is likely
> to suit us fine.
> 

However for us, a smallish portuguese transit provider, it makes a whole
of diference details like "where is hotmail.com connected" or "did
google move ?" 
For small, simple setups where IPv4 0/0 is fairly enough this whole
aggregation thing is just another detail.
For people who actually do traffic engineering stuff like aggregation and
geo-localization and (*gar*!) end-to-end route selection is just idiotic. 


> [..]
> > Why do we try to fix an engineering problem (scaling global routing
> > mesh (BGP)) with unworkable IP address distribution policies???
> 
> Because nobody came up with a fix to the BGP scalability issues yet...?
> 

isn't "memory is cheap" the mantra nowadays ? 

> [..]
> > What point does it make that we have got an IP address space so
> > large so we can assign an IP number to every grain of sand on this
> > planet if it can't keep the number?
> 
> IPv6 routing, using todays technology, is only going to work if you can
> have enough hierarchy in the routing system.  And yes, this means 
> "renumber".
> 

Ah. Yes, do tell 500000 customer and 4 diferent billing/provisioning system 
type ISPs to renumber if they change upstream provider. That will make you
popular :)

Now really, I rather have IPv6 now, evaluate the real practical problems and fix
them than spending years not having IPv6 cause the fix to a would-be problem 
introduces unworkable problems itself. 

-- 
Carlos Morgado <chbm at cprm.net> - Internet Engineering - Phone +351 214146594
GPG key: 0x75E451E2 FP: B98B 222B F276 18C0 266B  599D 93A1 A3FB 75E4 51E2
The views expressed above do not bind my employer.