Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/ale/ale-minutes-94dec.txt

Text File | 1995-02-28 | 4KB | 72 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Frank Solensky/FTP Software

Minutes of the Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group (ALE)

These minutes are based on notes taken by Fred Baker.


Summary

The ALE Working Group met for about an hour on Wednesday evening and
discussed the most recent analyses of the growth of the Internet as
measured by assigned numbers, the IEPG's response to the group's
recommendation from the Toronto meeting and the group's future
direction.  The growth analyses were placed at the end of the meeting to
accommodate the attending area director's schedule constraints.

As a result of the apparent growth trends presented during the Toronto
meeting, the working group decided to ask the area director to inform
the IESG that it may soon become necessary for IANA to start assigning
network numbers out of the upper half of Class A (aka:  `A-sharp')
number space for CIDR-like IPv4 address assignments and that planning
for this situation should begin.  Scott Bradner, in his capacity as the
IPng Area Director, recommended that the group identify the issues that
such a plan would raise and recommended workarounds before he could
forward it.

One such issue was discussed during the CIDR Deployment Working Group
meeting earlier that afternoon:  a router that was configured with a
default next-hop address and a route to a single subnetwork of a Class A
network number was unable to forward packets to the other subnetworks
within that same Class A network.  A software upgrade solved this
problem; the group's recommendation will include having all service
providers to support `classless' routers, the users inside a separated
fragment of a classful network number need to either make the same
upgrade or VLSMs with configurable static routes or default subnetwork
routing, and non-stub networks need to use classless routing protocols.
Fred Baker and Tony Li took an action item to place appropriate wording
into the next draft of the router requirements document.

Since the IPng area is expected to disband in the near future and much
of the remaining work also falls within the scope of the CIDR Deployment
group, it was suggested that the ALE group would be subsumed by CIDRD
with Jessica Yu and Tony Li nominated as co-chairs of the new group by
Vince Fuller and Frank Solensky respectively.  The actual merging of the
groups and their charters will be discussed on the ALE list shortly.

While performing the numerical analysis during the preceding weekend, an
inconsistency was discovered in the two most recent IP Allocation
Reports:  the counts of Assigned and Allocated Network Numbers in the
October report had dropped by 1% for Class B numbers and 14.4% for
Class C when compared to the August report.  Since there is no mechanism in
place for numbers to be returned to IANA, it was assumed that there must
be a bug in the program generating the reports; representatives from the
InterNIC were notified of the problem earlier in the week and planned to
investigate it as soon as possible.

The linear growth model, presented by Tony Li, included these last two
data points while the logistic model, presented by Frank Solensky, did
not.  Both models currently suggest that IPv4 addresses would be
depleted around 2008, give or take three years.

Tony repeated his suggestion from the Toronto meeting that the
registered owners of addresses in the lower half of Class A space be
contacted to see if any of these network numbers may also be reclaimed.
While there are only 63 of these numbers, these numbers represent more
than 12% of the total IPv4 address space; each network number recovered
in this manner may translate to an additional month of IPv4.