[6bone] pTLA request NDSOFTWARE - review closes 23 October 2002

[Pim van Pelt]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 06:25:47AM -0700, Bob Fink wrote:
| 6bone Folk,
Dear Bob,

| NDSOFTWARE has requested a pTLA allocation and I find their request fully 
| compliant with RFC2772. The open review period for this will close 23 
| October 2002. Please send your comments to me or the list.

In short: I oppose to this request also. Please read on.

It's Sun Oct 20 when I'm writing this mail. I have read some 60 mails,
most of which stick to the topic of DEFFAYETs request. Reading through
them, I find it refreshing to see that many of the regular posters of
this mailinglist seem to agree that it is not yet time to allocate a
pTLA to NDSoftware or Nicolas.

Last month, I saw a small thread on the lir-wg@ripe.net mailinglist,
where Nicolas complained in this public forum about the fact that the
NCC did not grant him an AS number request. NCC rectified their prior
decision and allocated an AS number to NDSoftware. I still had my doubts.

An autonomous system, in my book, is a set of routers which have the
same routing policies implemented. Somehow, the routers in NDSoftware
are not interconnected with private circuits (sdh/atm/ethernet). This
means the IPv4 cloud at NDSoftware consists of one or more IPv4
cloudlets (consisting of one machine each).

I myself did check out the websites (fnix6 and ndsoftware) and did see
mutitudes of 404's. I thought them to be typical of Nicolas' methodology.
Connecting them together with IPv6 tunnels does not seem like a big
deal. The current customer base is predominantly non-french/parisian. 

MEDs are multiple exit discriminators, used to steer traffic into some
specific router if you have multiple BGP sessions between your AS and
theirs.

IPng does not have a pTLA nor an sTLA. They are simply a project running
at the commercial ISP Intouch NV (AS8954) and they have a statically
(and natively) routed /32 out of the Intouch pTLA. It is irrelevant and
does not have to be dragged into the discussion just because Jeroen
helps administer that project.

I would like to personally thank John F (razier, look I spelled it
correctly :) for his long list of terribly useful questions (posted in
his mail with id g9K8gLo08725). I find DEFFAYETs replies to this mail
defensive and evasive to say the least.

I am not supportive of this request and protest against it because ever
since I've seen Nicolas join 'the scene', I have seen him push his work
forward using unorthodox methods. The most important one, is insisting
on using AS65526 because -- as he said so himself -- RIPE refused to
give him his own AS to run out of. During this phase, DEFFAYET kept on
introducing more instabilities into the 'Net, as also made public at
RIPE42 by Gert Doering. 

The reflection of the current setup at NDSoftware in the whois database
is crappy. It seems like DEFFAYET was collecting /32s from other pTLA
holders. We (the 6bone community) have requested him to clean up his act
on numerous occasions and he simply refused. 

DEFFAYET has his own set of rules that he wishes to play by. I don't
think (and urge you to note this), that the last point of rfc2772 states
that the pTLA requestor will obide by the best common practice and
cooperate with other 6BONE members. I don't believe that this was the
case in the past, nor that it will be the case in the future.

Please reconsider the pTLA allocation to NDSoftware.
-- 
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Pim van Pelt                 Email: pim@ipng.nl
http://www.ipng.nl/             IPv6 Deployment
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