Summary

  • James Spenceley's 2008 APNIC prop-065 asked the registry to present four-byte AS numbers as ordinary decimal integers and to return the same Whois record for searches in either notation.
  • His APNIC 26 slides put a face on the nuisance: AS2.37 and AS131109 identify the same number. A customer and a provider could carry different labels for one network.
  • APNIC reached consensus, then its policy chairs waited for the IETF. RFC 5396, written by Geoff Huston and George Michaelson, specified decimal notation in December 2008.

One network, two name tags

A customer calls its network AS2.37. The provider files it as AS131109. Both are right: multiply 2 by 65,536 and add 37. Now try explaining that to a customer database, a routing-registry form or the person debugging a script at midnight. In his APNIC 26 presentation, James Spenceley used exactly this pair to show how a four-byte Autonomous System number could pick up two public identities before anybody had changed the underlying number.

The punctuation did more than offend typographers. Spenceley's slides pointed to regular expressions that treat the dot as a wildcard, and to friction in SNMP, internal systems and IRR/RPSL records. Those were his operator-side reasons for preferring ASPLAIN, the decimal string, over ASDOT's high-part.low-part display. His question had the good sense of a help-desk ticket: which spelling would the customer, provider and CRM actually use?

His prop-065 gave APNIC two jobs. Delegate and record four-byte numbers in ASPLAIN; let Whois find the same record when a query arrives in either format. The first rule picks a label. The second lets people who learned the older label still find the network. Together they keep a registry from turning a formatting preference into two apparent identities.

The handoff from a meeting room to a standard

The APNIC 26 Member Meeting minutes put prop-065 among proposals that reached consensus in Christchurch. APNIC's history dates the Policy SIG and member-meeting consensus to 28 August 2008. After an eight-week final comment period, the Policy SIG chairs said on 27 October that they would take no further action while an IETF RFC on the notation was pending. A local registry process had met a question better settled across every system that prints an AS number.

That RFC arrived in December. RFC 5396, authored by APNIC's Geoff Huston and George Michaelson, chose a single decimal value for textual AS numbers. Its own example writes 65546 as “65546”; the ASDOT spelling is “1.10”. The RFC also tells IANA registries to use decimal representation. Spenceley proposed the APNIC change; Huston and Michaelson wrote the IETF standard. The institutional handoff is the ending: an operator's naming problem became a shared rule for systems that print AS numbers.

Spenceley had a separate prop-064 on assignment policy for four-byte numbers, implemented in February 2009. Prop-065 addressed the line on the screen. It caught a small failure at a moment when four-byte numbers were entering ordinary operations: if a number is the same, a registry should help everyone recognise it as the same.

Source record