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

Thu Dec 14 18:11:03 UTC 1995

>Gordon Cook writes:
> 
>  [some text deleted]
> 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
> 

The Routing Arbiter Service has two components - the Route Servers (RS)
and the Routing Arbiter DataBase (RADB). The RADB is one of the
components of the Internet Routing Registry (IRR).

Some of the information in the RADB is "historical." It was carried over
from the PRDB for purposes of the transition from the NSFNET Backbone
Service to the current US Internet Architecture. The RA team has been
working with CA*net and ANS to reduce duplicate route objects
which are artifacts of the transition.  Several months ago, approximately
3000 routes were deleted from the RADB because CA*net worked with us to
identify which routes were now being maintained in the CA*net DataBase.
Approximately, 1000 route objects have been deleted as a result of
a request from ANS more recently.

Approximately 20% of the route objects that existed at the time of
the transition have been removed.

Another area where the RA team has been agressively making efforts to
maintain current information is the maintainer objects.  On the
recommendation of the RIPE routing working group, the EOF and NANOG,
the RA team populated the incomplete maintainer objects 
from information in the InterNIC.  The direction that we received
from the community was that the maintainers of the data are the
only folks authorized to modify the data. The RA team contacted those 
maintainers and has indicated that the team is ready to make large
scale changes in the data in the RADB based on changes authorized
by the maintainers of the information.

ESnet, Delphi, PIPEX, ANS, internetMCI and CA*net (and probably other 
organizations) all maintain up-to-date information in the various components 
of the IRR (RADB included). And because they maintain up-to-date information,
that information is useful to them and the rest of the community. The
RA team has announced a tool which converts cisco configurations to
database format, and the team is willing to work with any organization
which wishes to make large scale changes in stale data.

        --Elise