Summary of the RA situation was Re: Routing registry was Re: Sprint BGP filters in 207.x.x.x?

Gordon Cook gcook at tigger.jvnc.net
Thu Dec 14 16:07:30 UTC 1995


Perhaps I owe some apologies for being harder on Sprint last night than I 
should have been.  Is there a routing arbiter list to which I should take 
this discussion??  If so please let me know where and how to join and 
I'll gladly oblige.  In the meantime let me summarize what I am learning.

Jeff Hayward points out:

The NSF funded regionals, not NSPs.  There is no requirement in
NSF93-52 that makes use of the RA mandatory.  The only requirement
placed on the regional's choice of NSP is connection to all priority
NAPS. 

Cook:  But apparently NSF funded R&E regionals must ALSO make their 
routes available to the RA?

For a friend at NSF writes privately to me that:

There is no requirement that anyone "use" the services of the RA. Specific
requirement is that:

>>Regional Networks and their selected NSPs must route and carry all
>>traffic originated at and/or destined for U.S. Research and Education
>>sites.  Moreover, Regional Network Providers must make their routes for
>>all such (U.S.Research and Education) sites within their (respective)
>>regions available to the Routing Arbiter.

Then Jeff Barrows makes and interesting and useful point:

The last time I checked, the _biggest_ argument against using the RA was that
alot of the data is incorrect.  I have also heard a lot about work that has
been done to clean up the RA.  Is this still the biggest factor?

-Jeff

>From Nanog archives jeff barrows cites sean doran as having said:

 I would point out one more thing though, and that's that
  at the Stockholm IETF I had a genial chat with a number
  of folks from MERIT and the RA Team in general,
  and suggested several ways that the RADB could
  be made incrementally useful.   I hope that some good
  comes out of that conversation.

  I'll use any tool that will make my job easier, and
  help our operation and the Internet scale better.
  At the moment, though, the RADB does the opposite,
  and the RS has no value whatsoever.

          Sean.

Now Bill Manning didn't NAME sprint yesterday in his complaint that I 
have cited.  But no one has told me that anyone else besides sprint was 
intended for the criticism.  Perhaps the question boils down to those 
raised by Sean in the preceding paragraphs?  What does need do be done to 
the RADB and RS to give them value?  There seems to be some strong 
disagreement between the Routing Arbiter and Sprint.  Why?  What do they 
see so differently?  And if MCI, PSI, UUNET and ANS don't agree with 
sean's criticisms why don't they?


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