From: Joe Abley (no email)
Date: Sat Feb 04 2006 - 16:17:47 EST
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
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