On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Joe Abley wrote:
On 29-Nov-2006, at 08:30, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:
Michael(_dot_)Dillon(_at_)btradianz(_dot_)com wrote:
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.
If it is, it's a very long-standing one. For example, see INET(3) which I
think is of 4.2BSD vintage, and which appears to have similar semantics to
the mentioned perl library:
I fail to see that as being stopping point. ASN is not an address and
should not be passed to INET library - after all you do not pass just
a number to the ASN-library just because its a number? Also note that
for ASNs the bounds for A.B parts (0-65535) are completely different then
A.B.C.D for ip address (0-255).
BTW - 3 or more "." is also commonly used in representing phone numbers
and I'm sure other things too.
The draft above received significant operator criticism.
The consensus I saw on NANOGm, for example, was that there was (a) no useful
reason to be able to distinguish between a 16-bit AS number and a 32-bit AS
number less than 65536, (b) no good reason to use punctuation to separate the
most- and least-significant 16 bits of the 32-bit ASN, and (c) every reason
to think that the most sensible representation was just "bigger decimal
numbers".
I did not see any consensus on that issue when it was brought to NANOG-m.
There was critisicm but its not anywhere near that majority said this
notation is bad - in fact I think its the other way around and most
thought it was fine.
As far as reasons:
1. We do not use full 32-bit number when talking about ip address for
good reasons - it would make things more difficult for humans who
need to remember and communicate them [ok - there are other historic
rasons too and CIDR based use as well...]. We put "-" and "." for
phone numbers eventhough there its not like 32-bit number and its
all same digits no matter with or without "-". Its all largelye due
to that large numbers are not natual to humans... So as number like
18.101 is easier then 1179749 and that helps when you're doing
manual debugging.
2. There is are reasons to believe that ASNs can be assigned so that
in new notation 2.x would indicate its ARIN and 3.x is RIPE region.
Its not necesarrily relevent for every case, but it does help.
3. Several different punctuation marks were explored on several lists
including ppml - generally people thought that "." was easiest due
to its use in ip addresses. You seem to argue the other way around...
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
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