So -- what did happen to Panix?

Sat Feb 4 21:17:47 UTC 2006

On 4-Feb-2006, at 15:21, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

> honestly I'm not a fan of IRR's, so don't pay attention to them,  
> but... is
> the IRR 'not well operated' or is the data stale because the  
> 'users' of
> the IRR are 'not well operated' ?

The data ought to be maintained by the people to whom it relates.

Customers (and peers) of some ISPs have great incentives to add  
appropriate records, since if they don't do so their ISPs' filters  
will not be widened to accept their routes.

Other networks have no such incentive, since their transit providers  
and peers either build their filters in other ways, or don't filter  
at all.

Generally, there is no incentive to remove data from the IRR, except  
in the case where resources are returned and reallocated to someone  
else who wants to make their own records.

Wherever there is a lack of incentive to keep records accurate, we  
can probably safely assume that they are either missing or stale.

"Customer" in this context means "anybody whose routes might be  
filtered by someone else". Since large, default-free carriers tend  
not to have their routes filtered by peers, those that don't use RPSL  
expressions to build customer filters don't have much reason to care  
about the IRR.

It's probably fair to say that if all the large, default-free  
carriers insisted that their customers submitted their routes to the  
IRR, then every route would be registered. This would not completely  
address the problem of stale data, though.

> (the IRR as near as I can tell is
> nothing but a web/whois server that you sign-up-for and push/pull data
> through, right?)

The IRR is a loosely-connected collection of route registries, all  
run by different people. Data originating in one database is  
frequently found to be mirrored in other databases, but not in any  
great systematic fashion.

Together these databases form a distributed repository of RPSL  
objects. Objects are generally submitted by e-mail and retrieved  
using whois, but some registry operators also make web interfaces  
available. Anybody who doesn't know what RPSL is can find out at  
<http://www.irr.net/docs/rpsl.html>.

Joe