Operational Issues with 69.0.0.0/8...

Mon Dec 9 15:55:12 UTC 2002

> So here's a question for people.  For those who filter, what about the 
> real-time feed that people want from the RIRs is different from this:

> lynx -dump http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space | grep "IANA 
> - Reserved"

1. Missing data. Your solution does not show the parts of 69/8 that ARIN 
has reserved or unallocated.

2. Referrals. Your solution provides no referral to another source for 
more detailed data. In another world, if I ask a .org server for 
www.ipv6.org it will "refer" me to the ipv6.org server who will "refer" me 
to www.ip6.org. With LDAP we have a directory service that can issue such 
referrals and have them automatically followed to provide as complete a 
view as we desire.

3. Not a crude hack. A UNIX shell script scraping data from a text file 
that was created as a human-readable document is not my idea of a 
directory service. We needed crude hacks like whois and RADB in the 
beginning when there were no other tools available and we had networks to 
build. But now we have lots of tools and technology available. Our 
companies are probably all spending money today on LDAP directories for 
internal use. It is becoming a standard IT technology and we should be 
leveraging it rather than continuing with crude hacks for old times sake.

--Michael Dillon