CURRENT MEETING REPORT

Reported by Bill Manning, Information Sciences Institute and Roger Fajman, National Institutes of Health

Minutes of the Procedures for Internet/Enterprise Renumbering Working Group (pier)

Agenda

Goals

Solicitation Number Two

General comments were made as to how Solicitation Number Two should fit into the PIER effort. The focus is to send it specifically to vendors. They expect very specific information.

The working group was encouraged to discuss this issue. Ralph Droms wants to make it a parallel and complimentary effort to the first solicitation. It is possible that individual copies will be sent to the vendors that are identified.

Howard Berkowitz stressed avoiding duplicating efforts. Paul Ferguson wanted to define a framework for the final documents. Bill Manning discussed using the final output to help people. Brian Carpenter talked about the IPng efforts to coordinate responses to their solicitations. Elliot Lear stressed his desire to get actual hard specific information, not warm fuzzy information. Howard B. pointed out that the people we are soliciting are more operations people, while the IPng efforts were more focused on strategic planners. Will Leland pointed out we should rename it "Vendor Solicitation".

Drainage of the Swamp in 192/8 (presentation by Suzanne Woolf, ISI)

Some people are encouraged, by the numbers, others are somewhat surprised. People discussed the level of educational efforts requested back. Bill asked what we do with the 189 people who responded about renumbering. The 5980 who responded are not the entire list because of a variety of reasons. Peter Lothberg pointed out that we shouldn't care about non-routable addresses. 192/8 takes up about 20% of the current routing tables (http://www.isi.edu/div7/pier/whose-routes). Bill Simpson asked about the 23 who aren't using their networks, but wouldn't give it back. He also suggested a BCP about keeping contact information up-to-date. Steve Bellovin pointed out that people are scared about giving addresses back.

Bill pointed out that one area PIER needs to concentrate on is education. There is a feeling that 192/8 are valuable since it is such a swamp that it will always be routable.

Current Experiences (Elliot Lear, SGI)

Going from 1 B and numerous C's to one/16, emphasis was to stablize their routing. SGI is somewhat like an ISP since everything is centralized. Most sites didn't want or have any incentive to renumber. Most sites could not do variable length subnets (ie. CIDR). The subnet masks at those sites had to be fixed. It must be insured that all routers could run OSPF and get rid of unnumbered WAN interfaces (using 255.255.255.252 masks). In addition, all routers must be brought up to the same software revision level. Scripts have been developed that automatically renumber SGI's machine. SGI has a policy to use FQDN's at all sites. Paul Vixie's bind implementation serves as a commendable effort. Lear pointed out that NIS has been a real problem for their large site. NIS Slave Servers are tricky to get the order right, in terms of getting new maps to them from the master, for SGI doesn't have a good DHCP until next release. The next kernel will have support for classless protocols. There was more discussion about getting OSPF areas to match across unnumbered interfaces. It was noted that there are also problems with secondary interfaces. Five different sites of a variety of sizes have been piloted, most under 50 hosts. They will soon be doing some 2-3 hundred sites soon. Seven million dollars has been spent so far, most of the expenses going towards personnel costs. This is estimated and includes more than renumbering. It was stressed that instructions are very important.

Ed Kern, Digex

Heavily-used options on CISCO's to help a transition plan. Many people were moved from /24's to /27's from their CIDR block. DNS moves caused the most problems. In addition, there were performance concerns about translators. Yakov has data which he will provide via email. He will also provide informal data. Yakov does not plan on writing a formal document.

8000 node Bridged Network (Brian Carpenter, CERN)

They are recabling every building from coax to cat-5 UTP. Everyone must renumber since they are moving off of the old bridged /16. They are renumbering people in small flag days. People get 4 weeks notice, then two weeks later another paper mail telling them again, and then an email the day before. A team of 5 people is working for 18 months, as well as routers running EIGRP.

Steve Bellovin, AT&T

They are just starting because of the breakup.Their addresses are mostly geographic so moves have a big impact. The ability to assign multiple IP addresses is very important. Solaris, BSDI, SGI (IRIX 5.3 with patches), and a module for SunOS NIS hates renumbering.

Paul Traina, CISCO

They moved from several dozen C's to several B's. This was done in coordination with a physical move. Sweep teams came by later to make sure people renumbered okay. Each day about 200 were completed. They are doing about 6000 hosts at 120-200 sites. Paul Ferguson is the coordinator of this section.

IP Addresses in Applications

Phil described plans to develop a cookbook for specific IP applications. He cited known problems with PROM-coded IP addresses in GE Medical patient scanners; the patient is made transparent by the application, but the application is not transparent to the Internet.

HP Openview and Cabletron Spectrum have been described as problems, but the people who have mentioned these firms have been very responsive to renumbering requests. Elliot commented that SGI had primarily encountered problems with network management products

There was consensus that vendors should be given guidance on how to write applications without hard-coding IP addresses. A short RFC was suggested on guidelines for creating license numbers that did not depend on hard-coded IP addresses.

Steve Bellovin reminded PIER that ipsec will require public/private keys for every machine, and there was a logical choice for license seeds. It was observed that key management for this approach has not been resolved.

Cadence and Mentor Graphics were also mentioned as having hard-coded license keys. Netscape 1.1's SOCKS variable needs to be an IP address, but this may have been fixed in Netscape 2.0.

Router Renumbering (Howard Berkowitz, PSC International)

Meta Discussion

RFC 1916 has come out.

Follow-up Activities

Dennis O'Leary will talk to Tim about setting up a Web page. In addition, we need to talk to Alison about http protocol problem with multiple IP addresses for virtual servers. (Bill Manning will do this.)

Roger would like to see a document about not using IP addresses in applications. (Look at RFC 1900)