New Draft Document: De-boganising New Address Blocks

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Wed Feb 25 10:31:49 UTC 2004


>> Timothy Brown wrote:
>> I disagree with the view that it is a hack.
>> It's no more a hack than using a DNS feed;

>I concur with this. Besides, from the pragmatic side of the "consumer",
>if it does solve a problem (albeit short or medium term) I don't care
>much if it's a "hack".

Then we all agree. The Cymru bogon feed is a hack. The
completewhois feed is a hack. In fact, any third party
feed that puports to identify authentic IP allocations 
is a hack.

The only fix for this is to get the addressing authorities
to provide an authoritative feed. That probably means
first getting the RIRs to do it and then ICANN to fill
in the gaps.

As to whether the mechanisms used by bogon feeds are hacks
or carefully crafted technology, well, my rule of thumb
is that if it can completely automate the process while still
allowing human intervention to make judgement calls on all
changes to network configuration, then it is carefully crafted
technology. I'm afraid that by this measure, using BGP feed 
as the mechanism is a hack because it involves plugging a 3rd
party directly into your routing architecture. A directory
service like DNS or LDAP is closer to the carefully crafted 
technology because it can be plugged into OSS systems that
allow humans to validate and release any network changes.

--Michael Dillon






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