Who has AS 1712?

Daniel Karrenberg daniel.karrenberg at ripe.net
Wed Nov 25 07:57:45 UTC 2009


On 25.11 06:21, Randy Bush wrote:
> > Of course if it was already assigned when IANA said that (no dates on 
> > the link above) then maybe the fault is more IANA's for telling another 
> > RIR that they could allocate an ASN that another RIR already allocated. 
> 
> i suspect that, in the erx project, there may have been more than one
> case of the iana saying "ok, X now manages this block, excpet of course
> for those pieces already allocated by Y and Z."  and the latter were not
> always well defined or easily learnable, and were not registered
> directly with the iana, but other rirs.
> 
> <rant>
> 
> and the data are all buried in whois, which is not well-defined, stats
> files, which are not defined, etc.  the rirs, in the thrall of nih (you
> did know that ripe/ncc invented the bicycle), spent decades not agreeing
> on common formats, protocols, or code.  this is one result thereof.
> testosterone kills, and the community gets the collateral damage.

[Excuse the length of this. Randy just overloaded my patience circuit
and I need to dissipate some testosterone induced energy.  If you are 
only interested in details about the issue at hand, skip this message. 
If you are interested in a different view on (history of) the RIRs, 
read on.]

Randy, 

it is absolutely unfair to shout at the RIRs and particularly at the
RIPE NCC in this context and I take offence.  This particular problem is
caused by a record keeping error back in the days when RIRs did not even
exist!  So these resources never went through the hands of the RIPE NCC
and were not conisdered by ERX at all.  I'll leave it to ARIN to publish
the detailed analysis once it is complete, but this is the essence of it. 

Back when I was responsible for the RIPE NCC in the 1990s, I personally
spent considerable time developing and proposing exchange formats and
database synchronisation tools.  The RIPE NCC proposed close
synchronisation of Internet number resource databases several times. 
This never got done because InterNIC and later ARIN resisted.  It was
quite frustrating.  You can find polite expressions of my frustration in
early RIPE NCC quarterly and annual reports if you look carefully.  When
APNIC was established, the RIPE NCC had close database synchroninsation
with them from the start; the same occurred with AfriNIC later; both of
these were achieved by definite *lack* of NIH and 'testosterone'.  
So if you cannot resist the urge to shout, please re-direct your
shouting.  This is all water under the bridge of course and we are
moving on; but blaming the RIPE NCC in particular for NIH and
'testosterone' is just unfair!  And no, we did not invent the bicycle,
but in moments of hybris I do claim that we did in fact invent the RIR
as such.  ;-)

I do not say everything is ideal now.  However the RIRs are actively
working to publish a complete set of stats files which also includes
unallocated resources.  This is the next best thing to full database
synchronisation. APNIC and the RIPE NCC are driving this effort. 

In fact the track record of the RIRs is excellent so far, given the
number of different resource blocks and the number of resource users. 
Yes, errors in historical records from two decades ago *should* be 
caught and all RIRs will certainly learn from this unfortunate
episode. But the blanket shouting of the kind you did here is 
unfair, offensive and unwarranted.

Respectfully

Daniel




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