Phillip:
1. My operators and engineers are telling me readability trounces anything else
2. The last thing we want is to have APNIC be the odd ball amongst the RIR's and IANA. As my company has customers in different RIR's, we do not want to have to deal with different formats from customers from different regions. From what I can gather so far, other RIR and IANA are using ASDOT.
3. As for regix, what is wrong with "_x.y_" for ASN "x.y"? Escape character "" is invented exactly for this reason.
yi
----- Original Message ----
From: Philip Smith pfs@cisco.com
To: Yi Chu yi_chu_01@yahoo.com
Cc: Policy SIG sig-policy@apnic.net
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 3:42:15 AM
Subject: Re: [sig-policy] last call: prop-065: Format for delegation and recording of 4-byte AS numbers
Hi Yi,
Yi Chu said the following on 10/9/08 11:24:
Randy and everyone:
I restate my objection to ASPLAIN.
- writing 32-bit interger as a ASDOT is much more readible by human than ASPLAN
And what do routers do? After all, routers are the ones that have to
deal with these things.
- Just as Randy noticed during the meeting, 32-bit AS is the same range as IPv4. I would think everyone would agree that writing and communicating IPv4 as a single integer (3420323840 is the same as 203.222.32.0) is a bad idea.
Have you tried using a 32 bit integer IP address? It works. Besides, the
dotted notation came out of history, helping to separate different
classes of IP address space. If we didn't have classes, I'm sure we'd
have come up with some other notation for IPv4 addresses. Plus we don't
have classes of AS space (nothing about it in the 4-byte ASN RFC), so
using any separator is plain dumb.
- It was mentioned that we probably will not exceed 7 digit ASN. However, this is exactly the mentality that got us here in 16-bit ASN and with IPv4. We can not forsee the new use of ASN in the future. It may happen that every household gets an ASN for mobile service in the future.
I still don't see how use of an ASN has anything to do with how it is
written into the router.
- It is in the equipment vendors' best interest to make their code to deal with both ASPLAIN and ASDOT, and provide best human-interface possible. ASDOT presents a much better human-interface than ASPLAIN.
Have you tried writing regular expressions to handle the dot-format ASN?
If not, please go and do that, and let us know how you got on. Maybe
give us some examples.
- APNIC as a registry should also present the best human interface as possible. ASDOT is the better choice.
Personal preference. Those of us who configure routers prefer the
Internet to work, not look pretty. Did you object to the format of IPv6
addresses when they first appeared? ;-)
philip
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