ULA Registration (Was: Re: IETF: SixXS is shutting down)

[David Farmer <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 9:14 AM, Pim van Pelt <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hoi Alex,
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 3:05 PM, Alexandre Petrescu
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Congratulations for past achievements!
> Thank you.
>
> > Tunnelbroker ok, but how about ULA generation and registration at
> sixxs.  Is
> > it shut down tombstone too?
> > https://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/ula/
> TL/DR: Plan of record is that it will cease to exist.
>
> This registry was for educational purposes, and has no official
> status. Importantly, as ULA is random per definition, the chance of
> collisions is extremely low. It is fairly straight forward to get a
> prefix from one of the RIRs. While that does cost some money, it is an
> activity that is not the main charter of SixXS and will be expected to
> continue with the RIRs.
>

There are other purposes for registration than just uniqueness, with ULA
such as identification of leaked traffic for instance, but more generally
registration facilitates many forms of operational coordination.  We have
the RIRs use registries because we want more than just a guarantee of
uniqueness, we also want to facilitate operational coordination on many
fronts.

Further, ULA prefixes provide something that RIR allocated GUA prefixes
don't, that is a presumption that they are not routed(or reachable) between
administrative domains.  While they can be routed between administrative
domains, this is really only suppose to happen with one-on-one
coordination. Were as RIR allocated GUA prefixes are presumed to be routed
between all administrative domains.  Their is no guarantee they are
actually routed between any two administrative domains, but it is presumed
to be the case.  And, ULA is presumed to be the exact opposite that.

While ULAs are presumed to not be routed between administrative domains,
that doesn't mean they are not use cases where registration can provide
advantages, especially when ULAs are used for enterprise use cases.  There
are probably much less advantages of ULA registration when all you are
looking for is a semi-stable prefix that isn't dependent on a service
provider, like in typical residential use case, but these are not the only
use cases for ULA.

> And what happens to the registrations?
> Can't quite parse the question - so let me offer three answers (maybe
> the answer you're looking for is among them):
>

I think he means the ULA registrations.  As I mention above, there are
other advantages to registration than just uniqueness.

>From this discussion on another list, here is the count of ULA
registrations in the SixXS database.
+------+-------+
| Year | Count |
+------+-------+
| 2007 |    63 |
| 2008 |   140 |
| 2009 |   321 |
| 2010 |   611 |
| 2011 |   835 |
| 2012 |   742 |
| 2013 |   724 |
| 2014 |  1096 |
| 2015 |  1303 |
| 2016 |   640 |
| 2017 |   143 |
+------+-------+

That is 6618 ULA block that were registered, that seems like that's more
than just a fad. Does this make a case for resurrecting the discussions of
ULA-C? I think it does.  But, what do others think?

Thanks.

Happy to discuss this or other things further as we near the lights-out
> date.
>
> groet,
> Pim
>
> --
> Pim van Pelt <[e-mail]>
> PBVP1-RIPE - http://www.ipng.nl/
>

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