--On Monday, December 9, 2002 15:55 +0000 Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
1. Missing data. Your solution does not show the parts of 69/8 that ARIN has reserved or unallocated.
Are you telling me that people are really going to update their filters every single time ARIN (or any other RIR) makes an allocation?
2. Referrals. Your solution provides no referral to another source for more detailed data. In another world, if I ask a .org server for www.ipv6.org it will "refer" me to the ipv6.org server who will "refer" me to www.ip6.org. With LDAP we have a directory service that can issue such referrals and have them automatically followed to provide as complete a view as we desire.
The file has that data (which registry has which blocks). A simple search/replace can refer you to the next data source.
3. Not a crude hack. A UNIX shell script scraping data from a text file that was created as a human-readable document is not my idea of a directory service. We needed crude hacks like whois and RADB in the beginning when there were no other tools available and we had networks to build. But now we have lots of tools and technology available. Our companies are probably all spending money today on LDAP directories for internal use. It is becoming a standard IT technology and we should be leveraging it rather than continuing with crude hacks for old times sake.
So put it in a perl script and make it look pretty. I'm just showing people that the data _IS_ out there, at least on the /8 level. If you want to wrap something fancy around it, write your own HTTP libraries to grab it yourself then go for it. But the data is there, at least on the /8 level. I would be very interested to hear how many people are generating filters for each and every allocation the RIRs make. Alec -- Alec H. Peterson -- ahp@hilander.com Chief Technology Officer Catbird Networks, http://www.catbird.com