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

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On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Joe Abley wrote:

On 29-Nov-2006, at 08:30, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:

Michael.Dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

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.

If it is, it's a very long-standing one. For example, see INET(3) which I think is of 4.2BSD vintage, and which appears to have similar semantics to the mentioned perl library:

I fail to see that as being stopping point. ASN is not an address and should not be passed to INET library - after all you do not pass just
a number to the ASN-library just because its a number? Also note that
for ASNs the bounds for A.B parts (0-65535) are completely different then A.B.C.D for ip address (0-255).

BTW - 3 or more "." is also commonly used in representing phone numbers
and I'm sure other things too.

The draft above received significant operator criticism.

The consensus I saw on NANOGm, for example, was that there was (a) no useful reason to be able to distinguish between a 16-bit AS number and a 32-bit AS number less than 65536, (b) no good reason to use punctuation to separate the most- and least-significant 16 bits of the 32-bit ASN, and (c) every reason to think that the most sensible representation was just "bigger decimal numbers".

I did not see any consensus on that issue when it was brought to NANOG-m.
There was critisicm but its not anywhere near that majority said this notation is bad - in fact I think its the other way around and most thought it was fine.

As far as reasons:
 1. We do not use full 32-bit number when talking about ip address for
    good reasons - it would make things more difficult for humans who
    need to remember and communicate them [ok - there are other historic
    rasons too and CIDR based use as well...]. We put "-" and "." for
    phone numbers eventhough there its not like 32-bit number and its
    all same digits no matter with or without "-". Its all largelye due
    to that large numbers are not natual to humans... So as number like
    18.101 is easier then 1179749 and that helps when you're doing
    manual debugging.
 2. There is are reasons to believe that ASNs can be assigned so that
    in new notation 2.x would indicate its ARIN and 3.x is RIPE region.
    Its not necesarrily relevent for every case, but it does help.
 3. Several different punctuation marks were explored on several lists
    including ppml - generally people thought that "." was easiest due
    to its use in ip addresses. You seem to argue the other way around...

--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william@xxxxxxxx

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