[6bone] winding down and returns?

[Jeroen Massar]

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Tim Chown wrote:

> Thanks Bob.
> 
> The next step is then to wind down the 6bone allocations, and perhaps
> encourage formal returns?  It may be that 50% of current holders are
> inactive due to commercial allocations, but have not bothered 
> to "hand in" pTLAs as there's isn't a process as such.

Afaik, the process is quite simple:
 - stop announcing the prefix into BGP
 - remove prefixes (inet6num, ipv6-site etc) from the 6bone registry
 - notify this (6bone@mailman.isi.edu) list that your organisation
   is returning the prefix and not using it any more.

This is what the other ISP's did when returning their prefixes.

Note that one in some cases cannot clean everything from the registry,
eg customers that put prefixes into the database, which is possible
as their are no mnt-lower's in place. The maintainers of the database
will in those cases clean them out.

If you want to see if your prefix is still seen somewhere you can
check that very easily using GRH (http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/)
If it isn't in the Looking Glass it will quite probably not be
seen anywhere. Though ofcourse not everybody provides a feed.
ASN's are encouraged ofcourse to sign up and providing BGP feeds
making it a better resource and thus helping the community.

> Some networks already don't accept 6bone prefixes.  So their 
> usefulness is already becoming more limited.

Not if one is using the prefix internally for testing purposes
ofcourse. For interconnectivity it does get less useful.

I would also like to add that I think that the 6bone project
can be called quite a success, having helped IPv6 deployment
in general and allowing many people to get early experience
by testing it using this deployment. Now into the future!

Greets,
 Jeroen

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