On Mar 13, 2012, at 3:19 PM, David Conrad wrote:
Owen,
On Mar 13, 2012, at 3:43 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
For example, the much-touted allocation to US DoD in the ARIN region is often characterized as a much larger allocation than it actually was because what was allocated to DoD was several much smaller blocks with a lot of holes in between the address blocks. Admittedly, those holes are being treated as a reservation which led to ARIN requesting additional space from IANA, but, the holes are not allocated to DoD and I expect in the future would start being issued to other organizations.
:-)
I would think that anyone looking at the DoD allocations objectively would think that either ARIN was incompetent and allocated multiple discontiguous prefixes to the same organization or the prefixes allocated were from a much larger block.
I, for one, don't think ARIN is incompetent.
Regards,
-drc
All allocations made by any RIR are from a much larger block.
I suspect that the discontiguous prefixes were at the (ahem request ahem) of the organization in question to support their idea of security through diversity. I don't have first hand knowledge or evidence to support that suspicion, but, I think under the circumstances it's pretty reasonable.
The assertion that this much larger block will not at some point have its holes filled in with allocations to other organizations is the assumption that I don't buy into on the part of people that want to pretend DoD was allocated/assigned the entire larger aggregate including the space not registered to them.
As you say, ARIN is not incompetent, so, I don't believe that they made a hidden registration to DoD by making pieces of it visible in registration records.
Owen