Re: BGP announcements and small providers

["Justin W. Newton" <justin () erols com>]

At 06:17 PM 2/25/97 -0700, Chris Phillips wrote:
> We service hundreds of dedicated customers and some customers don't mind
> renumbering (if they are small) but most of our larger customers who have
> more than 100-200 hosts on their network have expressed GREAT opposition to
> any such notion of renumbering. Its not that they don't want to do it
> because they are lazy, on the contrary, many companies cannot the afford the
> downtime or cost asociated with renumbering their LAN/WAN. 

Interesting, I have been able to renumber my networks with NO downtime, and
I am relatively certain that they could as well with proper planning.  The
caveat being that there may be problems with software packages which are
depndant on the IP address of the machine they are run on (which is
possibly the stupidest copy protection I have ever heard of).


> I agree that
> renumbering is an important aspect of address grooming for better agregation
> but there are some real $$$ costs to some end-user networks to do so. 

There are some very real costs to end user networks, as there are to
provider networks, I don't question that, and understand it all to well.

> Also,
> how many times can you ask a customer to renumber before they bail and go
> elsewhere?

I don't plan to ask mine to do it more than once (and yes, I am going to
ask a large portion of my customers to renumber once).  I was in my
upstreams space, and am now renumbering out of it.  I will likely lose a
few customers over this, but its a price I am willing to pay to have less
dependance on my upstream, and also bring my number of announcements from
around 11 to 2.  



Justin Newton                           
Network Architect                                       
Erol's Internet Services
ISP/C Director at Large
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