North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Question on 7.0.0.0/8

  • From: David Conrad
  • Date: Mon Apr 16 15:07:29 2007

Michael,

On Apr 15, 2007, at 2:58 PM, <[email protected]> <[email protected]> wrote: 
The world moved on around them but you
still see things like IANA's non-parseable text file

The text file is parseable -- we have empirical evidence. Every time we change the format slightly, people yell at us.

At the
same time, IANA and the RIRs just keep doing the same old thing as their
data and systems slowly rot away.

Not really. I can't speak to the RIRs, but IANA is working on both cleaning up the data in all our registries as well as coming up with an XML-based alternative representation for those registries.

Why doesn't IANA operate a whois server?

We do. The proper question to ask is why isn't our whois server populated with address information instead of just domain name information. I don't know the reason historically. However, today, when the topic was recently raised, concerns were expressed that IANA would be seen in competition with the RIRs and there are those that believe IANA (ICANN) should have no "operational" role whatsoever. With that said, IANA continues to look at adding top level (i.e., /8s for IPv4) block allocation information to the IANA whois server and this is something we're discussing with the RIRs -- I don't think anybody is particularly happy with the current state of affairs.

Why don't they publish a more detailled explanation field in each IANA
allocation record so that they can explain the precise status of each
block?

What sort of additional information would be helpful? As mentioned above, we're preparing an XML-based alternative representation of various IANA registries which would give us a lot more flexibility than the current text based representation. Feel free to send mail privately as this might get a bit down in the weeds for NANOG.

Why doesn't IANA and the RIRs collectively get off their butts and
actually make an "authoritative IP address allocation directory" one of
their goals?

Improving the IANA registries is one of our goals. While I can't speak to the RIRs, I suspect it is one of their goals as well.

And why don't they do all this with some 21st century technology?

I was wondering when LDAP would show up in this discussion... :-)

Rgds,
-drc