[AFRINIC-rpd] Academic IPv4 Allocation Policy Second Draft (AFPUB-2013-GEN-001-DRAFT-02)

[Guy Antony Halse]

On Thu 2013-01-17 (00:59), Owen DeLong wrote:
> You could, but you would be paying LIR fees, not end-user fees, and, IMHO,
> rightly so. You are acting as an LIR for those institutions and not as an
> end-user.

I walked into that one ;-).

My example was badly chosen.  I could give another, which doesn't cross this
boundary but would still be problematic in terms of the current wording.

However, rather than do that, let me speak to your concern.

We've agreed to disagree about this before.  I'll reluctantly admit that I
believe that most HE institutions I know of fulfil a very small LIR role, but
that by far the majority of the use of their address space fits what has
been described as an end user.

It occurs to me that the common-sense solution would be to apply a 70/30 (or
even a 90/10) rule to situations like this.

Otherwise we're going end up in the daft situation where a HE institution
does something like this to hack around the problem:

  I apply to AfriNIC wearing my end-user hat, sign an RSA, and ask for the
  /16 assignment I need to fulfil my primary, end-user role.

  I separately apply to AfriNIC wearing my LIR hat, sign another RSA, and
  ask for the /24 I need to fulfil my somewhat small LIR role.

If necessary I can do this as differing legal entities, since many
universities have not-for-profit subsidiaries for financial and tax reasons.

This is not efficient in terms of address space allocation (the /24 I need
for my LIR role could have come out of the inevitable power-of-two rounding
error in the /16 I need for my end-user role).

It is also not an efficient use of either my or AfriNIC's time & effort.  So
far as I can tell it is, however, completely in line with this and other policy.


If it really worries you, we can codify this into this specific policy with
something like:

  ... provided that not more than X% of the assignment may be used for
  not-for-profit, community engagement activities in which the HE
  institution is directly involved.

Replace X with whatever integer > 0 floats your boat.  The point is that the
current policy prevents me from using even a *single* IP; with just one IP I
could solve the problem using NAT (yuck!); with 5-10% of the address space,
it is probably a complete non-issue.

(For the record, the I applying to AfriNIC above is hyperbolic, because the
real I has legacy space and doesn't need to worry about any of this ;-).  I
do care about the principle though, because it affects all of HE including
institutions yet-to-be-formed.)

- Guy
-- 
Manager: Systems, IT Division, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
Email: G.Halse at ru.ac.za   Web: http://mombe.org/   IRC: rm-rf at irc.atrum.org
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