On 11.12.2015 at 11:09 CET Marius Petrescu wrote:
Together with Jann, we just switched my peering with the Hamnet from 16bit to 32bit. It seems to work properly, without issues, so it seems the road is wide open.
It seems that you are absolutely right.
Meanwhile I temporarily injected some 32bit-Sites in between all of the 16bit-AS of EU HAMNET to have a full mixed-up Network. Indeed our mainly Rf-based EU HAMNET behaves exactly as the mixed setups, which are common on the internet for quite a long time.
Although there are some specials in the EU HAMNET. Internaly the ASes mainly use BGP-Confederation, OSPF or other routing mechanisms are existent but rare (depends on the size of an AS and number of links to peers). Even a totally mixed-up Config within an AS works perfectly in the whole net: 16bit-ASN with 32bit-ASN for iBGP-Confederation works as well (proofed at KIT Karlsruhe) as 32bit-ASN with oldstyle-16bit-Confederation inside (proofed by myself on other sites). No issues found on mikrotik, quagga, bird up to now. We don't need to talk about that any more.
So what the hell we are waiting for?
EU HAMNET has started thinking about using private 32bit-ASN quite some time ago. Diskussions in our regular meetings pulsed up since 32bit-ASN where available.
But what we always were missing up to now was an international proposal for all countries using the 44-Net and, of course, a common agreement for using that. It makes no sense when everyone is rolling out a different System without talking to others. Chances of crashing are high and planing isn't even worth the time.
Regardless wether there is a registry, policy, human- or computerbased IP-Net-to-ASN-Generator out there, we all have to respect one minimal policy to keep everything running in the future:
Don't use concurrent private-ASN-proposals in parallel! Everything else is left to the countries themselves.
For example: Using the 42<mcc>xxxxxx in all countries is fine. But if some country starts using eg 42<IP-OctetofCountryDeployment>xxxxx there is high risk to crash with:
Greece, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Monaco, Andorra, Spain, Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, Vatican, Romania, Switzerland, Czech Rep., Slovak Rep., Austria, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine
All of them have mcc-codes between 0 and 255.
Using 42<dxcc>xxxxx in parallel to 42<mcc>xxxxx would hurt even more countries worldwide (higher density of countries between 0-255 in dxcc). And vice versa...
Some people within EU HAMNET tend to join to the 42<mcc>xxxxx proposal.
Last five digits are free to use. That gives about 100000 (0 - 99999) ASNs per country with one single assignment in mcc. Bigger countries with more mcc get more ASNs.
The 42<mcc>xxxxx proposal would work ok on a worldwide basis and it is used already by some countries.
EU HAMNET as a community of 16 countries will sit together and find out how they plan to deal with that. The internal discussion about that has been started on our internal channels. There is no reason to hesitate because even today EU HAMNET is compatible with 32bit-ASN peering.
73s Egbert