nanog mailing list archives

Re: identify hostname


From: Dean Anderson <dean () av8 com>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 21:32:45 -0500

True enough.  But it would cut out most of the the problems with really
small customers (such as the /30's which were mentioned ;-)

Sure there are some cases that are hard or impossible to account for, but
it would be helpful for ISP's to take a stance that "here's your address
space. Unless you tell us otherwise, we assume its not subnetted, and we
will block your broadcast addresse.  If you subnet or otherwise change your
broadcast address, you will need to notify us"

I guess what I'm saying is that for many, the default is to do nothing. The
default should be different where possible.

                --Dean

That works fine as long as you either manage your customers' equipment or
your customers don't subnet blocks you give them. However, in real-world
experience, neither of those apply, especially to a larger ISP/NSP (UUNet
was mentioned in this thread at the beginning).

It certainly doesn't hurt to put in access-list's where you can, to reduce
the problem, but that is not a scalable solution. It is an incredible
management nightmare, especially if you're having to keep track of
autonomous customer routing changes. Not to mention that it adds to the
burden of tracking down problems (imagine a DHCP server which assignes
what used to be a broadcast address, but is no longer because the subnets
were combined, and everytime a machine gets that address, it can't get
outside the network because the administrator hasn't updated the
5,000-line access-list).

Pete.




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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  dean () av8 com
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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