AFRINIC-5 Public Policy Meeting Minutes | 1 December 2006 | Balaclava Mauritius
Discussion on Open Policy Proposals (Moderated by Alan P. Barrett)
Alan Barrett explained how policies are developed within the AfriNIC region. Anyone in the community can come forward with a proposal for a policy. The proposal has to be sent to the mailing list This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and discussed at least 30 days before being put forward for adoption at an AfriNIC meeting.
One Global policy has been approved recently and it was the IPv6 allocation by IANA to RIRs. IANA has already allocated /12 IPv6 to RIRs.
Policy on 4-Byte ASN has been approved a couple of days ago by the board. As from 1 st Jan 2007 , 4-byte ASN will be available for allocation.
4 proposals are currently under discussions. One policy has been posted for about a week and will not therefore be discussed during this meeting.
IPv6 assignments for End Users (Jordi Palet Martinez )
Jordi Palet Martinez provided an overview of the proposal. The main points are highlighted below:
- A solution for provider independent resources for usage due to multi-homing or any other technical or administrative reasons for that.
- The qualification criteria
- Assignment Size of /32. Could start with /44
- Subsequent assignments can be made if required.
- Can be wasteful so suggest having this policy for a temporary period of 3 years.
The objection is that /32 is too big and /48 could be considered.
Jordi proposed the following options:
- Assignment size
/32 or
Anywhere between /32 to /44 or
/44 & reserve /32
- Temporary or permanent
- Alain Aina commented that he preferred assignment size of /44 and permanent allocation
- Randy Bush commented that he did not like the proposal and asked to see what APNIC and ARIN has done with regards to this type of policy. With regards to whether temporary and permanent allocations, he mentioned that no temporary allocations have returned their allocations upon end of term.
- Jordi says that if temporary is a problem, this can be removed and that all RIRs should have policies / procedures for recovering allocations.
- Mark Elkins mentioned an example where a temporary allocation worked. He suggested that temporary allocation be done and the policy reviewed every year or six months. Prefers a /32 block.
- Mark Kosters from ARIN and Verisign mentioned that Verisign has a lot of /48 used and that /48 can work.
- Ray Plzak from ARIN mentioned that as at today ARIN has allocated 16 /44 address blocks under a similar policy and so far they have not received a single complaint.
- Alan Barrett from AfriNIC mentioned that /32 is an enormous waste of address space and suggested that /48 be used as allocation size. He also mentioned a potential problem with BGP filtering of ISPs that currently run at /32.
- Alain Aina mentioned that operators outside in Africa might not adjust their filter for micro allocation which is being proposed for Africa .
- Mark Elkins asked how many allocations will be done for critical infrastructure so as to better assess whether there would be actually waste or not.
- Alan Barrett mentioned that his laptop is multi-homed and under the proposed policy he could get a /32 allocation and if everybody does that, then there would actually be waste.
- Philip Smith mentioned that temporary allocations do not work.
- Adiel Akplogan talked about filtering of prefixes and mentioned that changing the filtering criteria by ISPs should not be of concern, of more concern should be the practicality.
- Jordi summed up by saying that there seems to be consensus with regards to permanent allocation, but not to the allocation size.
- Randy Bush commented that this proposal should be for multi-homing only.
Consensus was not reached during the meeting with regards to this policy.
IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Policy (Jordi Palet Martinez )
Jordi is suggesting changes to the existing IPv6 allocation policy. These are:
- Changes to allocation size from /48 to any size
- Not to be an end site removed
- The organisations requesting the allocation can also be end-sites.
No discussions have been seen on the mailing list so far and it was proposed to have some discussions before it being put forward at the next AfriNIC meeting.
IPv6 for critical infrastructure (Frank Habicht)
Alan Barrett presented this proposed policy on behalf of Frank Habicht.
Critical Infrastructures can be defined as:
- critical DNS services
- TLD
- "important" SLD ( .co.za )
- . (root) unlikely, because 14 operators outside AfriNIC, likely remain at 14 (distinct IP addresses)
- Internet eXchange Points
- L2 switch fabric, interconnecting operators.
The reasons for this proposal are:
- help operators in Africa establish infrastructure
- security in planning and investing
- independence from other providers of addresses and/or connectivity
- probably more
On request AfriNIC assigns IPv6 address resource to operators of critical infrastructure. Internet Exchange Points, DNS root server operations, DNS ccTLD operations, and popular SLD DNS operations upon justification are considered critical infrastructure.
The default assignment size for an Internet Exchange Point shall be a /48. Assignments can be larger blocks on request with justification.
For critical DNS server operations (root DNS, ccTLD DNS, and SLD DNS with justification) default assignment size is one /48 from a reserved /44.
Operators of critical infrastructure can obtain ASN assignments from AfriNIC. They must be multi-homed to do so.
Jordi pointed out the problem with this policy is that it is restricted to critical infrastructures which are multi-homed and that most critical infrastructures in Africa are not multi-homed.
Mark Elkins co.za mentioned that they need independent allocation so as not to be hijacked by any upstream provider.
Vincent Ngundi from KeNIC suggested that proposal be approved and if there is any amendment to be done, this can be proposed at the next AfriNIC meeting.
Alan Barrett has a policy for IPv4 Provider Independent and a similar policy could be approved with changes
Philip Smith mentioned that there seems to be a problem with definition of Critical Infrastructure. Critical Infrastructure is only applicable if multi-homed. Thoughts should be given to multi-homing policy.
Consensus was not reached during the meeting with regards to this policy. Change allocation and assignment period to 12 months (Adiel Akplogan)
Adiel Akplogan, CEO of AfriNIC presented the proposal and stressed the need to adjust the practice to that of other RIR regions so that AfriNIC does not appear unfair compared to other RIRs.
- Currently, policy does not explicitly mention a time frame for planning addressing needs
- Practice is to consider 24 months
- Proposal is to change to 12 months
- Other RIRs are also considering changing to 12 months
- Currently: RIPE: 24; APNIC: 12; ARIN: 6; LACNIC: 3
Adiel also mentioned that all policies are temporary as they can always be amended at any time.
Alan Barrett mentioned that discussions should continue on this policy on the mailing list as it was posted only one week ago and it would be discussed at the next meeting.
The provided text is an excerpt from the AFRINIC 5 meeting report.
