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Re: Route Registry: who uses them?

  • From: Jeff Haas
  • Date: Wed Oct 25 20:05:54 2000

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 02:39:01PM -0700, Todd Caine wrote:
> I've been talking with our router geeks and we have been
> debating over the usefulness of route registries.

You wouldn't be the first. :-)

> Who should use Route Registries?  Why?
> Is it worth the time?

In an ideal world, everyone would register their routes, their
policies, their contact info and their PGP keys in the RR's.

Lets talk reality.

For a large number of the people using the routing registries - not
necessarily the RADB - they are best used for filtering routing
announcements along your edges.  In this case, your clients register
the routes they are going to be sending you and then you filter based
on registered routes.  This prevents OOPS.

(Note that I said registered routes - not policy.)

In the case where you have two providers who wish to exchange
a limited set of routing data with each other - i.e. not a transit
connection to the whole Internet - you can register your routes
and filter each other.  Again, this prevents OOPS.

To reduce this to its component issues:

1. I want to filter someone.
   This prevents an accident in their network from be propogated through 
   mine.
2. I need a way to represent the things to filter.
   RPSL provides a standardized way to do this.
3. Ideally, the people I'm filtering will be able to see my filtering
   criteria.  Possibly, they should be allowed to update the list of
   the networks we accept from them.
   IRRd, etc. permits whois access to the policy and the ability to
   update it.
4. I want to generate my filters programmatically.
   RtConfig, et alia will do this from IRRd.

You can't sanely expect to filter the Internet through IRRd right now,
too much of the data is (to quote someone at NANOG) "grot".

However, if both parties register the data for their nets in the RADB,
it saves them the grief of setting up their own IRR repository.

If you setup your own repository and get it mirrored, you provide your
info to the Internet at large, possibly helping others solve operational
issues with your net.

-- 
Jeffrey Haas - Merit RSng project - [email protected]