North American Network Operators Group

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Change in NACR procedures

  • From: Elise Gerich
  • Date: Fri Jan 13 14:56:39 1995

In preparation for the retirement of the PRDB and the move to the Routing
Arbiter (RA) architecture, Merit proposes to change our NACR-handling 
procedures to more closely mimic the registration procedures of the
Internet Routing Registries. We propose to implement these changes on
January 20, 1995.  Please send any comments regarding the changes to
[email protected] as soon as possible.

Procedural changes:

1.  NACRs for a given net will only be accepted from designated
email addresses from the  net's home AS or from the AS which is 
currently listed as the primary path according to the PRDB.

To verify what the designated email addresses are for your
Autonomous System number, use the whois client:

	whois -h prdb.merit.edu contact <as number>

To update the designated email addresses for an Autonomous
System, send email to [email protected] Please register the exact
email address which will be used to add or change information in
the PRDB.  For example, if the designated email address is [email protected]
and the NACR is received from [email protected], it will
be bounced. 

In general we anticipate that this change should pose little or no
problem.  In the event that a net changes providers, one of the following 
two procedures will have to be followed.  Either (a) the administration 
of the net's home AS sends a NACR specifying the new provider as
primary (and possibly deleting the old), or (b) the administration
of the old provider sends the NACR.  If the new provider wants to
submit the NACR, they will need to send it to the administration
of the home AS for forwarding to Merit.

Very few administrators of home ASs which are behind ASs that 
peer directly with AS 690 have designated individuals and their
associated email addresses as authorized to update the PRDB.
For more information in establishing an aslist with Merit,
please send a message to [email protected]

2.  ACKs/NACKs for NACRs will no longer be required, and in fact,
will be ignored if received.

3. Copies of accepted NACRs will be sent to all associated ASs.  
This includes notification of changes to nets already in the PRDB.

Typically, we would expect that all the ASs which are associated
with a net would be aware of any change in routing preferences.
However, this notification procedure will alert ASs that a change has
taken place even if they had not previously been informed about the change.

NACR Processing

As of January 20, 1995, Merit will begin to implement this change.
If mail to [email protected] contains a NACR originated from
an authorized account as described in procedural change (1),
it will be processed.  If it didn't, the mail will be
bounced.

If for some reason you want your NACR to be read even if  
it would otherwise be deemed unacceptable, include a non-null
comment: field in the NACR.

Summary:

This is the first step in providing a transition to the RA architecture.
We have been experiencing an increase in the number of NACRs which
are being submitted to the NSFNET Backbone Service, many of which
pertain to the movement of networks from one provider to another.
For the month of December, [email protected] received more
than 4200 messages.  More than 1200 changes were made to the
PRDB on January 13, 1995. These new procedures will help to make 
the registration process more manageable.

For those organizations which are in the process of changing
to another provider (autonomous system), the organization can
improve its chances of having changes to the PRDB made in
a timely fashion and to protect itself against loss of reachability by:

	a. sending NACRs in advance of your cutover (at least one week)
	b. adding the new provider as secondary (tertiary, etc)
	c. having the new provider start announcing the route
	d. testing the route by having previous provider stop
           announcing the route
 	e. sending a NACR deleting the previous provider

Please check that you have designated correct email addresses for
your Autonomous System prior to January 20,1995.  Mail to
[email protected] which is a valid template and originates from 
an undesignated email address will be bounced back to the originator 
of the message starting on January 20, 1995.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

          --Elise