Re: ASN draft

[[e-mail]]

> | 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.

It reduces the number of things an ASN means to its original
meaning of an administrative domain.  Route tagging can occur 
through RDI's.

Then one has to ask why BGP keeps mutating... :) Yakov?

> An AS doesn't request address space, an organization does.
> An AS describes a group of routers, not an organization.

Uh, no.  An AS is an administrative domain. An ASN
can be used to describe a set of routers & routing policy.
It can also be used to identify the administrative domain.

> Some organizations have lots of ASes.  Some organizations
> have no AS.

Yup. So why are we trying to indicate that an ASN is used strictly for
routing policy?

> 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.

I do want the draft to reflect that an ASN is not exclusively reserved
for describing routing policies, that its original intent as a 
tag for administrative domain is valid.  How this affects the IANA
is unclear to me.  How it affects route registries based on RIPE-181
is a bit clearer.

> | 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).

Your small SINs are the original use of ASNs.

> 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. [*]

Uh, nope.  It also describes administrative policy.       

> [*] 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.

Exactly.  An administrative choice that Apple Computer makes to
route portions of its traffic in certain directions.  The mapping
of which prefixes map to which ASNs is something that is not part 
of BGP but is contained elsewhere (a route registry of some form).

This adminstrative policy can be instatiated in routing policy.

--bill