Re: [Idr] WGLC on draft-ietf-idr-as-private-reservation-00

[Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]>]

On 14/12/2012 17:40, Jon Mitchell wrote:
> I don't think there seems to be much concensus around any of the
> discussions to change the range in the draft but there are a number of
> people supporting in it's current state w/o these reservations, there
> are literally billions of options we could choose from, especially when
> we consider David is now suggesting two ranges (the only other person on
> the list who has commented).

http://www.foobar.org/~nick/router-bgp-x.pdf

This is a graph of the number of google results returned for the
quote-enclosed query "router bgp x", for values of x ranging from 64512 to
65535.

Couple of things of note, apart from the fact that it isn't data, and that
it is more likely to reflect documentation rather than what people have
configured on routers:

1. "router bgp 65535" is quite common although it is officially a reserved asn.

2. there are large spikes at the beginning of the range, around 65500, and
right near the end of the private ASN range.

3. there are smaller spikes at every asn which is evenly divisible by 100,
and also at 65412 (i.e. 64512 with second two digits transposed - there are
a lot of dyslexics in the industry), 65432, 64555, 65111.

While it's not data, it does lend some credence to a hunch I had that
people naturally prefer round numbers and numbers at the beginning / the
end of a pre-specified range, and that they largely ignore the numbers in
the middle, except for the occasional cutesy number here or there.

Speculating wildly, I suspect the underlying reason for this is that people
find the numbers they've chosen to be easier to remember when working with
them.  After all, we're human.

Full config at:

http://www.foobar.org/~nick/router-bgp-x.dat
http://www.foobar.org/~nick/router-bgp-x.gnuplot

Nick