North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

RE: Question on 7.0.0.0/8

  • From: michael.dillon
  • Date: Mon Apr 16 16:26:27 2007

> > 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?
> 
> IANA's role in this should be 'Ugh.  Here Big Block.  Go Talk to RIR.'

I was referring to the cases where they don't say that.
For instance, the text file has 4 columns. Address Block 
and Date are pretty clear and straightforward. The last
two fields, however are explicitly ambiguous. One is
entitled "Registry - Purpose" and the other is labelled
"Notes or Reference". And immediate improvement would
be a whois server that serves up 6 data items per entry
such as:

AddressBlock: 010
Date: Jun 95
Registry: None
Purpose: Private Use
Notes: 
Reference: RFC1918

In the case of 7/8, that Notes field could contain a couple
sentences to explain the unusual situation of that block.
If course, it would be good to add a few other fields there
as well, such as 

Whois: whois://ws.arin.net:43

in order to provide a referral chain as one person mentioned.
Or, maybe all this is already defined in the RIR database schemas
and IANA should just adopt the same schema.

Note that for some blocks, useful additional info could be placed
there such as:

AddressBlock: 019
Date: May 95
Registry: None
Purpose: Direct Assignment
Notes: Ford Motor Company
Reference:
Whois: whois://ws.arin.net:43 FINET

which gives the RIR holding additional info and the NetName tag
to use when looking it up there.

The bottom line is that lots of organizations, not just ISPs, want to
see a complete and up-to-date picture of the status of the entire IPv4
space (and Ipv6 space someday) because criminals are using hijacked IP
addresses to hide their identities. They believe that the whois
directories, collectively, should identify the organization who has
administrative control of any IP address and should lead to a technical
contact who is ready, willing and able to act when informed about
network issues, whether they are abuse issues or some other technical
problem. The current whois system has no authoritative root leading to
large gaps in the data. And the lack of a root means that the 5 RIRs all
do different things, leading to large amounts of garbage data in the
system. Even when this data accurately identifies an organization, it
often turns out that the organization either doesn't have administrative
control over its network or else they have no technical contacts who are
ready, willing and able to act when contacted.

I believe that fixing the IANA issues will lead to the others being
addressed.

--Michael Dillon