NANOG 61 wrapped up yesterday in Bellevue, Washington. It is always different attending a conference in your home town; this was also the largest NANOG ever. On Tuesday morning, ARIN held a public policy consultation. Since I didn’t get a preview out before the meeting, here is my review of the discussion around the recommended draft policies.
2013-8 Subsequent Allocations for New Multiple Discrete Networks
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy fixes an issue with the current policy which was highlighted by ARIN staff at an meeting last year. This policy describes how ARIN should allocate blocks for new sites for organizations which use the multiple discrete networks policy.
Discussion: Previous issues in the policy draft centered around how ARIN should test if/when a site should receive an allocation. The new text uses the phrase “has shown evidence of deployment.” There have been no negative comments about this new text and I suspect the AC will move this policy toward last call at their next meeting.
2014-5 Remove 7.2 Lame Delegations
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy removes section 7.2 which was formerly used when ARIN was conducting DNS lame delegation testing.
Review: This policy has not been in use for some time and the current policy carries some risk to operational DNS should it be implemented as currently written. Furthermore, the operator community has not asked ARIN to reinstate this monitoring service. I believe consensus has been achieved on this policy and it will move forward to last call.
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy adds language to the experimental allocation policy to restrict overlapping assignments. This policy was created after multiple RIRs allowed an IPv6 research project to proceed by allowing an organization to obtain letters of agency permitting them to use overlapping address blocks. ARIN has acknowledged that this action was a mistake and will not grant similar permission in the future.
Review: This policy has been widely supported by the Internet operator community since its introduction. Some editorial changes were made to the policy just prior to the meeting and the AC must discuss those changes to make sure they do not change the intent of the policy when it was previously moved to its current recommended state. It seems likely that this policy will also be advanced to last call.
2014-13 Reduce All Minimum Allocation/Assignment Units to /24
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy changes changes the minimum IPv4 allocation size to a /24 for both ISPs and end users. This policy was rushed through the policy development process after a few organizations reported that their upstreams would not assign them /24 address blocks and they also could not qualify for an address block under current IPv4 policies. This policy also fixes issues that ARIN staff highlighted with the shortly upcoming exhaustion of ARIN’s IPv4 free pool.
Review: While the textual changes of this policy ended up being more complicated that many hoped, I believe the issue which triggered this policy draft will be resolved by this policy and that the additional simplification will also be beneficial. The staff review raised an issue about the maximum initial allocation size for new entrants. Current ARIN practice relies on a set of examples which are being removed by this update. Some discussion was considered about adding an initial maximum, but no agreement could be made on those changes. In the end, I suspect ARIN will continue with their current practice for block sizing, but an actual maximum would not be enumerated in policy. I believe this policy will be advanced to last call by the advisory council shortly.