Summary

  • Nick Hilliard authored RIPE proposal 2012-09 after conference organisers found the old temporary-address window too short for shipping, configuration and route propagation.
  • The accepted text changed an event assignment's allowance from event length plus seven days, capped at one month, to event length plus one month, capped at two months. It also adjusted project buffers and peak IPv4-use measurement.

The policy clock started before the conference

The first badge has not been printed, but the routers must already know their addresses. INEX's named people page identifies Nick Hilliard as an engineer who operated its exchange and helped build IXP Manager. His RIPE 2012-09 proposal put the work before a temporary network comes alive on the policy calendar. An event network might last a few days. The old temporary assignment could run only seven calendar days longer than the event, with a one-month total ceiling. Hilliard pointed to equipment shipped and preconfigured off-site, room for addressing mistakes and the weeks that route debogonisation can take. A deadline written for the event programme was running ahead of the network team.

At RIPE 65, he brought three possible fixes to the Address Policy Working Group: extend the period to four weeks, remove fixed time limits or create a booking system. Those were options put to a room, not the final rule. The accepted proposal took a measured path. For a short event it permitted one month beyond the scheduled duration, with a two-month overall ceiling. For a longer project or research assignment, the margin beyond expected life grew from two weeks to one month, still subject to a six-month limit. The April 2013 policy text set the resulting terms out in RIPE-587.

There was another small but revealing repair. Under the old wording, short-lived IPv4 assignments faced an immediate 50% utilisation test; longer ones had staged 25% and 50% thresholds. The new rule asked whether at least half the requested space would be used concurrently at peak during the assignment. A conference LAN ramps up, peaks, then goes dark. Measuring the peak fits that shape better than interrogating an unopened equipment case.

Hilliard's rationale carried a trade-off. RIPE NCC's impact analysis said longer terms could reduce the unused supply in its reserved /13 temporary IPv4 pool over time, though it forecast no significant impact from the evidence then available. The proposal was accepted on 17 April 2013. The temporary clock still had an end date. It finally made room for the people building the network before the doors opened.