Re: ASN draft

[Sean Doran <[e-mail]>]

| Wrong.  Jon holds the strings that make me dance. :)  And besides, we have
| defined a new number space, we just need folks to use it.  (Guess.  Nope,
| Guess again.  Your right... RDI's!)

You will first have to explain to everybody what added
value IDRP brings over the constantly mutating BGP4 other
than being able to do interdomain routing for CLNS and other
popular protocols.  Oh, and eating up lots of router memory
maintaining enormous amounts of state.

| I don't think this is a Merit/PRDB thing.  I got this home-as stuff from the
| RIPE stuff.

Psst - Tony Bates, your telephone is ringing...  :)

| To me, the AS defines an administrative bound. One that
| can request delegations of address space.

Well, you're among the only folks who have this particular mindset.

An AS doesn't request address space, an organization does.
An AS describes a group of routers, not an organization.
Some organizations have lots of ASes.  Some organizations
have no AS.

If you are wanting to change the draft to reflect the view
that an AS is an administrative entity with some kind of
quasi-official standing wrt IANA and his registries, I think
you are heading in the wrong direction.

| But there does not have to be.  In that case the 
| prefix delegation to AS map acts as an indicator of potential for new routes.
| In a routing registry and in Rwhois, the ASN is the tag used to identify
| the scope of the administrative bound.

You are trying to overload a particular set of numbers with
semantics which do not match how the numbers are used in the
real world.

This will lead to unnecessary confusion, won't do what you
seem to want anyway, and is going to cause you more grief
than simply making up a "small-i internet number" to describe
administrative bounds, and using that in the registries.

You could relate ASes (as units of routing policy) to
"small-i internet numbers" (SINs, anybody?) in your database
as a way of describing the routing policies of any given
small-i internet (like Sprint or MCI or CA*net or JAMINTEL).

The "Autonomous" in Autonomous System has to do with routing
policy and only routing policy.  It has nothing whatsoever
to do with organizational identity.  Any relationship between
an AS number and a single organizational entity is purely
coincidental, and probably pretty rare. [*]

	Sean.

[*] This seems odd, but think about it: AS 714 doesn't
    describe Apple Computer Inc., but rather the part of the
Apple Internet that routes towards BARRNET and CERFNET,
behind which one can find several different organizations
(several are independent enties in a legal sense), all
talking to a clump of routers sharing the same routing
policy.  This is quite common.