North American Network Operators Group
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Re: So -- what did happen to Panix?

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Sat Feb 04 16:19:28 2006 
On 4-Feb-2006, at 15:21, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
honestly I'm not a fan of IRR's, so don't pay attention to them, but... is
the IRR 'not well operated' or is the data stale because the 'users' of
the IRR are 'not well operated' ?
The data ought to be maintained by the people to whom it relates.

Customers (and peers) of some ISPs have great incentives to add appropriate records, since if they don't do so their ISPs' filters will not be widened to accept their routes.

Other networks have no such incentive, since their transit providers and peers either build their filters in other ways, or don't filter at all.

Generally, there is no incentive to remove data from the IRR, except in the case where resources are returned and reallocated to someone else who wants to make their own records.

Wherever there is a lack of incentive to keep records accurate, we can probably safely assume that they are either missing or stale.

"Customer" in this context means "anybody whose routes might be filtered by someone else". Since large, default-free carriers tend not to have their routes filtered by peers, those that don't use RPSL expressions to build customer filters don't have much reason to care about the IRR.

It's probably fair to say that if all the large, default-free carriers insisted that their customers submitted their routes to the IRR, then every route would be registered. This would not completely address the problem of stale data, though.

(the IRR as near as I can tell is
nothing but a web/whois server that you sign-up-for and push/pull data
through, right?)
The IRR is a loosely-connected collection of route registries, all run by different people. Data originating in one database is frequently found to be mirrored in other databases, but not in any great systematic fashion.

Together these databases form a distributed repository of RPSL objects. Objects are generally submitted by e-mail and retrieved using whois, but some registry operators also make web interfaces available. Anybody who doesn't know what RPSL is can find out at <http://www.irr.net/docs/rpsl.html>.


Joe