Re: Fwd: The IESG Approved the Expansion of the AS Number Registry

Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

>> Until all software understands the bigger numbers, people
>> will want to continue using the 16-bit ones.
> 
> The IESG message talked about numbers from 65536 to some
> big number. Here suddenly, we see a reference to some
> number of bits.
> 
>> Meanwhile, to encourage the migration to 4-byte ASNs, the RIRs have
> 
> Now there is a reference to some number of bytes. What is going
> on here?

I think we're mixing up the number of bits reserved and the decimal
representation.  So far, 16 bits were used, or 2 bytes, the extensions
use 32 bits on the wire.  16 bits can be used for an unsigned decimal
number up to 65536, so it does make some sense to use that instead
of a string of 0's and 1's.

> On the NANOG list it has already been pointed out that a lot
> of network management software cannot handle such notation and
> in some cases, 1.0 could be interpreted as the IP address 
> 1.0.0.0. It has been confirmed that one widely used PERL 
> library interprets x.y as IP address x.0.0.y.

I think this is a bug.

> Because of this I think it would be useful for the IETF
> to publish a draft defining the notation for AS numbers
> so that we can either keep it simple or, if a new notation
> is to be used, then publicly state the issues of software 
> which needs to be changed. Such a draft should really come
> from the WG which extended the AS number in the first 
> place.

There is:

   Canonical Textual Representation of 4-byte AS Numbers
   draft-michaelson-4byte-as-representation-02

describing the format of ASN32 and

   RPSL extensions for 32 bit AS Numbers
   draft-uijterwaal-rpsl-4byteas-ext-01.txt

describing what has to be changed in RPSL based tools for ASN32.  For
the latter draft, there is no good place in the IETF right now, but I
do welcome comments.

Henk

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