Lazy Engineers and Viable Excuses

Tue Aug 26 09:14:02 UTC 2003

On Monday, 25 August 2003, at 21:32PM, Jared Mauch wrote:

> 	You of course are correct with the trusting of the data, but
> we are in a somewhat of a chicken and egg situation.  If people don't
> trust the IRR, they don't filter on it, and then the data is
> allowed to get out of date.  But people who maliciously add bogus
> (or excessive route objects for example) are easy to track down.  This
> is what the maintainer objects are for and why the IRR software keeps
> logs of the messages (including headers) that are submitted.

I'm not suggesting that the IRR is not useful. I'm saying that it's 
important to appreciate what it is good for, and what it is not good 
for.

For example, it would be unfortunate if an ISP used the IRR to build 
prefix filters for customers as a replacement for a manual scheme in 
which updates were scrutinised for legitimacy, without an understanding 
of the implications of the decision.

Joe