Announcing RISwhois - RIPE NCC IPv4/IPv6 address to origin mapping

Thu Nov 6 17:00:17 UTC 2003

[Apologies for duplicate mails]

Dear All,

RIPE NCC is pleased to announce RISwhois, a new interface to the BGP data
collected by the Routing Information Service (RIS). Using a set of ten
Remote Route Collectors (RRCs) installed at different locations around the
world, the RIS collects BGP information from over 200 IPv4 and IPv6 peers.
RISwhois complements our existing prefix query and looking glass tools by
providing a higher level view over an entire set of RRC routing tables. 

The service looks up IPv4 or IPv6 addresses in the most recently collected
full RIB dumps and reports the prefixes and origin AS numbers that match the
specified IP, as well as the RRCs on which the prefixes were seen. This can
help users in obtaining a quick answer on route visibility (i.e. where is
it seen, how widely does it spread) and in assigning origin AS numbers to
IP numbers in applications such as traceroute. 

RISwhois listens to the whois port (port 43) and outputs data in a format very
similar to the route objects specified in RPSL. Thus applications that, to date,
consult a routing registry, like whois.ra.net, can easily obtain more accurate
IP to AS assignments by contacting the RISwhois server, riswhois.ripe.net,
instead. For example, a study in the context of RIPE NCC's Test Traffic
Measurements found 21% of a set of unique IPs unmatched when using the routing
registry vs. only 1% unmatched when using RIS data.

For more information see: http://www.ripe.net/ris/riswhois.html

Please send your comments to ris at ripe.net.

Best regards,

For the RIS team,

-- Rene

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Rene Wilhelm                    RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Email: wilhelm at ripe.net         Amsterdam, the Netherlands 
Phone: +31 20 535 4444          http://www.ripe.net/ris
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