Michael(_dot_)Dillon(_at_)btradianz(_dot_)com wrote:
Until all software understands the bigger numbers, people
will want to continue using the 16-bit ones.
The IESG message talked about numbers from 65536 to some
big number. Here suddenly, we see a reference to some
number of bits.
Meanwhile, to encourage the migration to 4-byte ASNs, the RIRs have
Now there is a reference to some number of bytes. What is going
on here?
I think we're mixing up the number of bits reserved and the decimal
representation. So far, 16 bits were used, or 2 bytes, the extensions
use 32 bits on the wire. 16 bits can be used for an unsigned decimal
number up to 65536, so it does make some sense to use that instead
of a string of 0's and 1's.
On the NANOG list it has already been pointed out that a lot
of network management software cannot handle such notation and
in some cases, 1.0 could be interpreted as the IP address
1.0.0.0. It has been confirmed that one widely used PERL
library interprets x.y as IP address x.0.0.y.
I think this is a bug.
Because of this I think it would be useful for the IETF
to publish a draft defining the notation for AS numbers
so that we can either keep it simple or, if a new notation
is to be used, then publicly state the issues of software
which needs to be changed. Such a draft should really come
from the WG which extended the AS number in the first
place.
There is:
Canonical Textual Representation of 4-byte AS Numbers
draft-michaelson-4byte-as-representation-02
describing the format of ASN32 and
RPSL extensions for 32 bit AS Numbers
draft-uijterwaal-rpsl-4byteas-ext-01.txt
describing what has to be changed in RPSL based tools for ASN32. For
the latter draft, there is no good place in the IETF right now, but I
do welcome comments.
Henk
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