SWIP and Rwhois in the Real World

Thu Dec 1 19:34:41 UTC 2005

On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Randy Bush wrote:

>
>> Can someone summarize the alternatives to the ARIN recommended RWHOIS
>> server bits (from rwhois.org)?  A quick hit on Google and Freshmeat was
>> fairly barren.
>
> i use irrd

I'm curious how you or anyone else using irrd deals with the following 
issues:

1) Needing to be able to tell ARIN how much of your space is reserved vs 
assigned, what percentages of each of those are the various 
"sub-categories" ARIN seems to care about.  i.e. Dial-up, Cable, Hosting, 
Leased Line, DSL, Colo, Wireless, other.  Did you hack the irrd source to 
add a custom field(s) to route objects, abuse the member-of field, or 
create a maintainer object for each category of usage and use the mnt-by 
field as a classifier.  Or if you have all your space in irrd, can you 
just point ARIN to your whois server and say "there's all the data, have 
fun with it", and skip questions 4-8 on net-isp.txt?

2) Finding unassigned space, preferably appropriately sized for the 
desired allocation.  Shell script that asks irrd for all routes mnt-by 
your "Unallocated maintainer" sorted by (selectable) either prefix or 
prefix length?

2a) Finding open bits of reserved space.  i.e. We'll commonly take a /24 
and mark it as reserved for router interface /30s.  The /24 isn't "open" 
anymore, but until its been used up, there's lots of /30s within it that 
are available for assignment.  I suppose instead of putting the /24 in 
irrd as reserved, each of the /30s could be put into irrd marked as either 
reserved in use, or reserved available.

3) Assuming you let multiple people add/remove route objects, what's done 
to enforce consistency in the data?  Perhaps a web interface to sending 
the updates that populates as many of the fields as possbile from pull 
down selections?

Also, is there some secret to mirroring other registries with irrd?  After 
installing, I figured it'd be fun to play with someone else's data, so I 
tried to mirror altdb and then arin.  Each gave me similar errors:

% ERROR: serials (1 - 108) don't exist!
% ERROR: 4: Invalid range: serial(s) 1-2902 don't exist

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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