IRR-clueful person at 3356?

Fri Aug 17 18:23:58 UTC 2012

Thanks to all who reached out to me in private email and on IRC.

Here's the thumbnail explanation of how to do it (so some future
searcher doesn't curse me for not summarizing to the list).

By default Level(3) only searches one IRR component for you.  I can
understand why one would want to scope things this way but it sure was
confusing.  It's possible to have one's searchpath set to look in
multiple IRR components explicitly (or "*" if you want more standard
behavior) - these parameters are hinted at in the output from "whois
-h filtergen.level3.net help" but you need someone in tech support to
set this up for you in 3Scape; don't expect the first line guys to be
able to help you beyond telling you that your update failed.

There's another way though - Level(3) uses an extension to RPSL that
allows one to explicitly state sources in the as-set like so:

   "remarks:" is normally just a remark and not evaluated, BUT...
   "remarks: Level3 members:" is a magic construct that will cause the
   rest of the line to be evaluated by Level(3) as one or more
   "IRRCOMPONENT::AS-OR-AS-SET" pairs.  Apparently unqualified
   AS-OR-AS-SET values are allowed too, presumably to default to either
   whatever your normal pull-from IRR component is or from LEVEL3, but it
   looks as if one can't go wrong by explicitly stating each pair.

Comcast and Yipes both have very nice as-sets that can be used as
cheat sheets for how the grammar works:

whois -h rr.level3.net as-cbc
whois -h rr.level3.net as-yipes

(careful with as-yipes - you get two objects back, one with a source
of LEVEL3 and one with a source of RADB - it's the LEVEL3 one that you
are interested in).

Disclaimer: I haven't tested this all the way yet.  The origin AS
expands right and the friend's upstream has been updated and we're
just waiting for mirroring to happen.  If there's nothing further from
me in this thread in a couple of days then it worked.  :-)

-r