Question on % of good routes and plea for an RA mail list was Re: Routing registry was Re: Sprint BGP filters in 207.x.x.x?

Thu Dec 28 21:09:32 UTC 1995

In message <Pine.SUN.3.91.951226143523.1922H-100000 at tigger.jvnc.net>, Gordon Co
ok writes:

Dear concerned netizen,  :-)

> COOK:  So when you say 20% of the routes have been removed, how does one 
> judge what remains that is defunct and still remains to be removed????  Of 
> the 80% does anyone have a clue as to whether 95% of the 80% are "good" or 
> whether the real total of good routes might be on 50% of the 80%??

The US had the PRDB and Europe had the RIPE database and both were
good things.  The RIPE database was a better format since the PRDB was
AS690 specific.  The PRDB had accurate data but no origin AS and some
field mismatches with the RIPE-181 format, but served as a good seed.
For the most part, the 20% that was removed at CANET, ANS, RIPE, and
MCI request is now better validated and resides in these databases.
The remaining 80% is not neccisarily wrong.  The only thing that need
to be right is the mapping of prefix to origin AS, since the origin AS
is primarily what people who generate prefix lists use as the basis
for routing.  It would be nice if the contact information was right
too, but not essential.

The job of removing any inaccuracies due to remnants of the old PRDB
AS690 policy which became the AS690 advisories for a (too long)
interim period is squarely in the hands of ANS and we're working on it
but not by throwing up our hands and throwing it all out as some
suggest.  We are going through it somewhat systematicly, verifying
policy toward origin AS and specific exceptions, with priority given
to any routing trouble tickets that arise.  Doing this manually is not
a very promising approach, so we are hoping for better tools to help
identify obvious problems and building some ourselves.

The PRDB was used mostly to populate route objects.  The stuff that
was originally populated from the PRDB, if unchanged would have a
"changed field" with nsfnet-admin at merit.edu in it.  If that's gone,
then someone updated the information.  If still there, either the
information wasn't updated or whoever updated didn't change the field
(it wasn't checked until recently).  There are 23,175 such records
(with nsfnet-admin at merit.edu in the changed field) of 45,361 in the
RADB (local copy ftp'd yesterday).  In the 5 IRR databases, there are
a total of 342,720 records (counting aut-nums, people, inetnums, route
objects, and everything else).  The IRR is more than just the RADB and
the RADB data, though seeded from the PRDB and initially somewhat
questionable, is clearly being maintained.  [note: these counts are
based on some quick greps, but I think they are accurate.]

> Now Elise has questioned the propriety of using NANOG for questions about 
> the routing arbiter.  Fine.  But as far as I can tell no one is running a 
> routing arbiter mail list.  Without such a list the only choice is to 
> take things to one on one private mail with bill manning and/or elise.

I didn't save Elise's message but I think she was asking that the
public "feedback" on the quality of Sprint's service (and everyone
else mentioned) didn't fall under the umbrella of operational issues
requiring cooperation among providers (or whatever the wording was).

I don't think any new mailing list is needed.

Curtis