SIP in higher education

[bob bownes <>]

Art Gaylord wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I generally like Ben's Domain Redirect idea, but am concerned about 
> dealing with prefix collisions and the complexities of parsing 
> variable length prefixes coupled with variable length local 
> extensions. It also seems unlikely that campuses with long names will 
> really want to use that as a prefix.
>
> An alternative that I just thought of might be to use the Autonomous 
> System number associated with each campus.  This has the advantage of 
> being globally unique, relatively short, and decimal based to start 
> with.  The obvious disadvantage is that AS numbers something that many 
> people know. On the other hand people don't inherently a campuses area 
> code and exchange prefix either.  Some campuses may have multiple AS 
> numbers but this isn't really a problem as they could either pick one 
> as their SIP.edu prefix or use multiple the prefer.  Since there won't 
> be collisions either way it isn't an architectural problem.
>
> Just an idea and one I've not carefully thought about, but figured it 
> might worth others considering as well.
>
> Art


One of the other folks here and I spent some time tossing the AS number 
about as an idea. We came up with the following 'issues'

   1) as you say, it isn't something everyone knows. Easily remedied.

   2) There are some locations that may not have an AS number (few, but 
possible)

   3) AS numbers are one to five digits long. Do you parse variable 
length, or pad them?

   4) Does not extend well outside the sip.edu community (see #2, above)

   5) Some locations have more than one AS. - Pick one and use it.

However, it is an interesting idea.

Bob