North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Has PSI been assigned network 1?

  • From: Cengiz Alaettinoglu
  • Date: Thu Apr 20 14:11:23 1995
  • Posted-date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 11:08:07 -0700
It seems to me that everyone has some sort of an internal policy
database. Perhaps some providers actually get a call from their
customers and login to their routers and update the config files to
reflect that new policy. But my impression is most providers have a
database (in ASCII file format, ripe-181, NACRs, mainframes, etc) and
generate config files from this.

The way I look at a routing registry is that a routing registry is a
way of accessing each other's internal database or bringing them
together in a common place accessible by everyone. For it to be useful
it must have a common format, currently Ripe-181. Ripe-181 lacks
certain features which are often used by US providers to describe
their policies. Hence we are developing a new language, called RPSL
(Routing Policy Specification Language). Please contribute to its
development so that this common format is adequate for all of us. Your
internal format may still be different (ANS uses a superset of
Ripe-181) as long as it is converted to the common format before
making it public.

Now that we have common place, a repository, is this information
useful? As long as there are lots of tools to access this information
in useful ways, I think it is. Currently, one can configure its
routers from this registry (RtConfig tool), or do diagnosis
(prtraceroute) or do policy analysis (prpath, prcheck). More tools are
coming.

Why trust the registry, as opposed to your internal database? This is
a very good point. Hence, we are also in the process of defining a
hierarchical registry organization for IRR (Internet Routing
Registry). Some providers (like MCI) may maintain a part of this
global registry, and some may prefer to have their internal database
and convert it to the common format and make it available somewhere
else (say RADB or Ripe).

If you wish to join rps wg and contribute or at least provide
feedback, please send mail to [email protected]

Cengiz

-- 
Cengiz Alaettinoglu       Information Sciences Institute
(310) 822-1511            University of Southern California
http://www.isi.edu/div7/people/cengiz.home