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,
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------