Re: Gentle Reminder about NANOG

[bmanning () ISI EDU]

> Please send me a summary of your remarks from Tuesday's discussions prior to
> 9:15am concerning RFC 1797 and OPS review of IETF documentation.

OPS review:

        With the increasing number of RFCs and drafts that have a direct
        impact on operations, the question was asked if a true operations
        forum like NANOG would be willing to function as a review board.

        It was noted that there have been efforts in the past to address
        this issue, within the Operations Area of the IETF, which met with
        some difficulties.  It was suggested that the IESG be approached
        regarding a modification of the standard RFC template to include
        a operational impact statement, much like the security impact 
        bullet.  Bill Manning has taken the action item to do just that.
        He has asked the IETF OPS AD for input and will talk to the RFC
        editor when she returns, about making this suggestion at the next 
        IESG meeting.

        There are some hopes that if there is progress in this area that 
        operators will actually spend time reviewing drafts prior to 
        publication with an eye to the impact the proposed changes will 
        have on operations.

RFC 1797 status:

        RFC 1797 is authorization to test for problems in a distributed class
        A, before the IANA begins delegation of CIDR blocks in the traditional
        class A space.  Every owner of an AS number has the subnet 
        39.<AS & 0x7fff>.0/24.  The assignment is temporary, and lasts 
        until 951131.  There are currently 12 providers with registered 
        delegations.  The inital test is to be able to support your own
        in-addr domain from the primary server. There are currently some
        reachability problems, since some providers are blocking /24 nets.  
        Current both cisco and gated code is being tested. Bay Networks 
        may be involved soon.

        There are a few hosts currently on-net that are not ciscos:

                in-addr.ep.net
                anka.stupi.se
                exp39.ripe.net
                postel.wind.surfnet.nl

        Other hosts should be brought on-net and some interesting services
        should be hosts on them.  It is likely that one or more root name
        servers will be moved and at least one ftp and web server may make the
        change.

        Two of the lessons learned so far:
        - Conversion to classless EGP is mandatory (BGP4 is your choice)
          and conversion to a classless IGP is mandatory.  This last
          is not generally recognized and may be the cause of significant
          problems in 1996 unless there is action taken NOW.
        - cisco users need to add the following: "ip classless" to their configs.

        There has been set up a mailing list to coordinate and discuss this
        experiment: exp39 () isi edu.  Send to exp39-request () isi edu to join.


--bill