And the panel is cooler too?

I agree that in general, /30 is wasteful, but the point of these allocations is that the address must be portable from one physical location, and network, to another. So I can pick up a host in Boston and move it to Minneapolis if necessary and keep the same IP, even if nothing else moves. Since this geographic portability and address stability happens to be important to the application, a /30 is the best approach that we’ve found to do it.

I understand it’s my own people’s fault for allocating a /64 – that’s why I made the point of saying I applied for the IPs internally :-)

I see your point about address fragmentation, and I’m sure this is the motivation my local admins had behind their allocation practice. They’re allocating out of a /48 network, I believe.

josh,

ARIN is almost certainly using automated tools to check. I don’t know what they do – just a ping? If it’s just a ping, it’d be trivial to fake allocations. Just put a ton of IPs as virtual interfaces on some box and they’ll all respond, even if you don’t use them.

A guy I worked with in the mid-90’s completely defrauded ARIN when they started requiring these justifications. He sent them detailed, but wholly fabricated documentation of our allocations, including invented conversations between real and fictional employees discussing various allocation issues. I found it amusing that he chose to make me the company’s resident jack@ss and most of the profanity-laden comments had my name attached. He got the allocation he requested (easily 2-4 times what we really needed).

But hopefully ARIN would notice and figure it out… of course, if they just did it based on total usage, that couldn’t happen!

I guess an argument against total usage is that it makes it harder to compile the report, and harder for ARIN to check. However, anybody making a report has an automated way to do it (nobody wants to do even 4,096 IPs by hand), and ARIN only randomly checks various IPs for accuracy, so having the full report wouldn’t really add any work for anybody (besides the poor script creating the report)!