RFC 1879 (rfc1879) - Page 1 of 6

Class A Subnet Experiment Results and Recommendations

Network Working Group                                 B. Manning, Editor
Request for Comments: 1879                                           ISI
Category: Informational                                     January 1996


                       Class A Subnet Experiment
                      Results and Recommendations

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
   does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

Discussion/Purpose

   This memo documents some experiences with the RFC 1797 [1] subnet A
   experiment (performed by the Net39 Test Group (see credits)) and
   provides a number of recommendations on future direction for both the
   Internet Registries and the Operations community.

   Not all proposed experiments in RFC 1797 were done. Only the "case
   one" type delegations were made.  Additional experimentation was done
   within the DNS service, by supporting a root nameserver and the
   primary for the domain from within the subnetted address space.  In
   addition, testing was done on classless delegation [2].

   Internet Services offered over the RFC 1797 experiment were:

         Finger
         HTTP
         Telnet
         FTP server/client
         Gopher
         kerberos
         lpr (and its ilk)
         X
         DNS

   F.Root-Servers.Net, a root name server had an interface defined as
   part of the RFC 1797 experiment.  Attached is a report fragment on
   it's performance: "My root server has processed 400,000,000 queries
   in the last 38 days, and well over half of them were to the temporary
   39.13.229.241 address (note that I retained the old 192.5.5.241
   address since I knew a lot of folks would not update their root.cache
   files and I didn't want to create a black hole.)" - Paul Vixie





Manning                      Informational