On May 10, 2010, at 12:48 PM, Nick Hilliard wrote: > On 10/05/2010 17:00, Aaron Glenn wrote: >> my gut says things would do well to begin with simply making an effort >> at maintaining usable irr data and automagically generating sane >> filters. why don't people do that again? I hope I'm not naively >> misunderstanding a primary use of irr data in front of 10,000 of my >> closest friends... > > There are a lot of problems associated with using IRRDB filters for inbound > prefix filtering. > > - some clients announce lots of prefixes. This can make inbound prefix > filtering difficult in some situations. > > pixiedust:/home/nick> grep '>' pakistani-telecom.bgpdump.txt | wc -l > 967
There are certainly issues around what a customer may have as their primary path and what they are backup for. These issues make for very long prefix-lists. > - there are some endemic data reliability problems with the IRRDBs, > exacerbated by the fact that on most of the widely-used IRRDBs, there is no > link between the RIR and the IRRDB, which means that anyone can register > any address space. whois.ripe.net doesn't allow this, but lots of other > IRRDBs do. Certainly this is a function that you can petition your local RIR to do, have you made a proposal to them? > - the ripe whois server software does not support server-side as-set > expansion. This is a really serious problem if you're expanding large ASNs. Have you asked them to include this? > - there is very little client software. At least irrtoolset compiles these > days, but its front-end is very primitive. rpsltool provides some really > nice templating functionality, but doesn't implement large sections of the > rpsl standards. I certainly agree the tools here are suboptimal, but is that the the reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater? We're faced with a challenge here, where I surely agree with Peters argument that things won't get better here in the next ~7 years. Who is going to be the provider that turns away business because their customer is unwilling to register their routes in a klunky-toolset? What improvements to the toolset should go back to the community to improve filtering? If there is no RIR <-> IRR link, will people be willing/able to get a certificate when RPKI becomes more readily available? Will you accept a network outage because your certificate expires (vs a warning, ala SSL certs expired)? There are many questions here that require engagement by community members to provide viable solutions. Challenges certainly arise when you have nation-state telecom operators/incumbents involved as well that are unaccustomed to being told they MUST do something they may be unwilling to. - Jared
