CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Frank Solensky/FTP Software Minutes of the Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group (ALE) These minutes are based on notes taken by Fred Baker. Summary The ALE Working Group met for about an hour on Wednesday evening and discussed the most recent analyses of the growth of the Internet as measured by assigned numbers, the IEPG's response to the group's recommendation from the Toronto meeting and the group's future direction. The growth analyses were placed at the end of the meeting to accommodate the attending area director's schedule constraints. As a result of the apparent growth trends presented during the Toronto meeting, the working group decided to ask the area director to inform the IESG that it may soon become necessary for IANA to start assigning network numbers out of the upper half of Class A (aka: `A-sharp') number space for CIDR-like IPv4 address assignments and that planning for this situation should begin. Scott Bradner, in his capacity as the IPng Area Director, recommended that the group identify the issues that such a plan would raise and recommended workarounds before he could forward it. One such issue was discussed during the CIDR Deployment Working Group meeting earlier that afternoon: a router that was configured with a default next-hop address and a route to a single subnetwork of a Class A network number was unable to forward packets to the other subnetworks within that same Class A network. A software upgrade solved this problem; the group's recommendation will include having all service providers to support `classless' routers, the users inside a separated fragment of a classful network number need to either make the same upgrade or VLSMs with configurable static routes or default subnetwork routing, and non-stub networks need to use classless routing protocols. Fred Baker and Tony Li took an action item to place appropriate wording into the next draft of the router requirements document. Since the IPng area is expected to disband in the near future and much of the remaining work also falls within the scope of the CIDR Deployment group, it was suggested that the ALE group would be subsumed by CIDRD with Jessica Yu and Tony Li nominated as co-chairs of the new group by Vince Fuller and Frank Solensky respectively. The actual merging of the groups and their charters will be discussed on the ALE list shortly. While performing the numerical analysis during the preceding weekend, an inconsistency was discovered in the two most recent IP Allocation Reports: the counts of Assigned and Allocated Network Numbers in the October report had dropped by 1% for Class B numbers and 14.4% for Class C when compared to the August report. Since there is no mechanism in place for numbers to be returned to IANA, it was assumed that there must be a bug in the program generating the reports; representatives from the InterNIC were notified of the problem earlier in the week and planned to investigate it as soon as possible. The linear growth model, presented by Tony Li, included these last two data points while the logistic model, presented by Frank Solensky, did not. Both models currently suggest that IPv4 addresses would be depleted around 2008, give or take three years. Tony repeated his suggestion from the Toronto meeting that the registered owners of addresses in the lower half of Class A space be contacted to see if any of these network numbers may also be reclaimed. While there are only 63 of these numbers, these numbers represent more than 12% of the total IPv4 address space; each network number recovered in this manner may translate to an additional month of IPv4.