[retronet] RetroNet globally-routable address allocation policy

[John P. Willis]

Hello all,

As I develop the application for managing a RetroNet participant's address 
space allocations for the various protocols, I have a number of policy 
proposals that it would behoove us to address sooner rather than later:

Autonomous System Numbers:

  * Firstly, do we want to support 16-bit ASNs, 32-bit ASNs, or both?

  * If we want to allow user-requested ASN allocations, I'd like to carve
    out a reserved range for this near the top of the 16-bit and/or 32-bit
    space.

  * My initial approach will be to allocate a single ASN to any registrant,
    pending further discussion. The database is architected in such a way
    that adding the ability to support requests for additional ASN
    allocations will be trivial.

IPX:

  * IPX network numbers are in the range 0x1-0xFFFFFFFE. For our purposes,
    it seems unlikely that we'll exhaust this resource, especially given
    the 48-bit nature of IPX node addresses.

  * I would begin by allocating one IPX network number to each registrant,
    that number being the same as the registrant's ASN.

  * We need to come up with some guesses as to how many participants we may
    attract. This way, we can reserve a range of IPX network numbers above
    the automatically allocatable range for users who request additional
    IPX networks.

AppleTalk:

  * AppleTalk network numbers are--like the original definition of ASNs--a
    16-bit quantity. If there are more than 64k participants in RetroNet,
    I'll be quite surprised. However, like ASNs (in the case that we settle
    on using 16-bit ASNs only), I think we should be judicious about
    handing out huge numbers of AppleTalk networks without a good reason.

  * I'll allocate one by default, again corresponding to the primary ASN of
    the registrant.

X.25:

  * Are we looking at mostly VCs or PVCs? If VCs, then we have a DCC from
    (I believe) 000-999, plus a network ID of 0-9.

  * I have no experience with X.25, so I'll be leaning on others for input
    on this. However, at present, I'm thinking about not doing an automatic
    X.25 address assignment, but allowing a participant to request a single
    (and only one) DCC, and they'd be able to use all 10 network IDs within
    it.

IP:

  * I believe we have tentatively settled on using RFC 6598 addresses, in
    the range 100.64.0.0/10.

  * How much address space should we allocate by default? Perhaps a /24
    to each subscriber?

SNA:

  * I have no idea how SNA addressing works, so I'm leaving this out for
    the moment.

DECnet:

  * Area numbers (in Phase IV and Phase V) are 6-bit, from 0-63. This is
    a VERY limited resource.

  * Leaving out for now.

I welcome any feedback, input, etc. on this.

Thanks,

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JP Willis jpw at chivanet.org                     Voice 575/520-9542 Fax 575/449-4122
ChivaNet Internet Services, 425 S. Telshor Blvd., Ste. C202, Las Cruces, NM  88011
Hardware, n.:  The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.       (Borrowed)
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