Re: ASN draft

[Bill Manning <[e-mail]>]

> 
> 
> | The ASN is the number that defines administrative bounds.
> | In a route registry it denotes span of control.  If an AS
> | has the ASN redefined to only be a route tag, then what
> | will replace it in the route registry to denote span of
> | control?
> 
> Bill -
> 
>    Are you suggesting that the purpose of an ASN is to
> provide something convenient to tag routes with at the
> registry level, rather than something that is used to
> uniquely identify an AS, where an AS is a clump of routers
> with an identical and consistent routing policy?
> 
>    If so, you are out of your tree.

Must be true then.  Tagging prefix/mask pairs (NET objects) under
Aut-Num objects seems to be the way to clearly identify the "home-AS"
in a route registry.  Paul asked for -one- instance where the ASN is
not used for BGP.  I gave him one.  Co-opting the NIC assigned ASN
for use strictly as a routing tag is IMNSHO, a -bad- idea.

It sounds like what you are really after is the functional equivalant
of the RFC 1597 prefixes.   A set of "reserved" ASN's that are used 
strictly for routing.

> It's a fact of death, actually, with a sizeable handful of
> routers maxing out their CPU dealing with those flaps.

Forest/Trees issue.  Flaps have always been there and will always be
there.  The bigger the net grows, the more flaps will occur.  Even
the mighty NANOG (in its guise as the Crimson Permanent Assurance Co.)
can't stop flaps. Neither can any specific router vendor. Any specific
ISP can develop policies to effect egregious holddowns to dampen flaps
but they won't go away.  Time to ask vendors how they intend to deal with
the need for bigger/better CPU's/Memory etc for the comming 10-12 nets
world that we are designing for.


> This will be a big topic at NANOG.

No doubt.  :)

> 
> P.P.S.: | If we could get a working IDRP base from any
>         | commercial router vendor
> 
> Personally, I believe that Cisco has more important things
> to be spending Paul and Ravi's time one than IDRP development.
> 
As clients/customers We are all entitled to tell cisco what to do... Yes?
-- 
--bill