RE: IRR listing of IANA-reserved, a question..

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 william () elan net wrote:
> > List the 128-191/8 allocations first. Getting this information from the
> > RIR's has been tedious.
> Unless IANA was responsible for those initial allocations, it should not
> be IANA's task to make this list. And if IANA makes such a list I think it
> should be separate from the /8 list presented at
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space

Originally IANA (Postel) allocated all the numbers. So if its old enough,
or special enough like the Cable net 24, it originally came from IANA.
But who really cares if it originally was allocated by IANA?

Over the years, parts of blocks have been allocated by different groups.
In some cases part of the allocations in a network range were originally
done by one group, and part way throug the range the maintenance was
transfered to a different organization (e.g. maintenance of the 24 block
was transfered to ARIN).

At the simiplest, figuring out who did what when is still a mess.

But we do NOT need to answer that question.

If an address block has NOT been allocated by IANA, it should NEVER appear
in the global Internet routing table exchanged between ISPs.  To make that
a positive statement, according to IANA has block X been allocated for
unicast routing purposes?  We don't need to know who, where, when, why.
Just what.

Net/8   Allocated for unicast routing on Internet
0/8     N
1/8     N
2/8     N
3/8     Y
4/8     Y
...
10/8    N
...
127/8   N
...
224/8   N
...
255/8   N

I know, what about multicast, what about Class E addresses, what about
addresses allocated by IANA but not by the RIR, ...  All great questions.

People want this information so they can filter their BGP routing tables.
What addresses are "legal" (following the liberal in what you accept,
conservative in what you send motto) for the global Internet BGP
routing table.  As a first cut let's document, preferably in a machine
readable form for easy updating, what are the network blocks allocated
for use.