Sean Donelan wrote:
A provider has made the claim to me that RIPE is allocating /24's addresses to various European providers. Is this true? What affect does this have on providers with prefix-length filters?
To quote the ripe-159 "European Internet Registry Policies and Procedures" document: "The minimum size of an individual address space allocation is /19"
Or is this provider just mis-reading the RIPE allocation database.
Probably...
It isn't always clear at what point RIPE has delegate something, and at what point a provider has registered a more specific route since the delegation and routing database appear to be merged in the RIPE model. And in fact the RBnet could aggregate many of these announcements.
Possibly some confusion between the routing registry ("route" objects) and the allocation and assignment registry ("inetnum" objects) which, for RIPE, are held in the same database? In the RIPE database inetnum objects have a status field which is either "ALLOCATED ..." (an allocation from the RIPE NCC regional registry to a local internet registry) or "ASSIGNED ..." (an assignment by a local IR to a customer). To find the first-level allocations from the RIPE NCC to local registries you can do, taking the 62/8 block as an example, whois -h whois.ripe.net "-T inetnum -r -m 62/8" (the RIPE whois client makes this slightly cleaner as the arguments don't have to be quoted)
Network [...] *>i62.76.0.0/22 [...] *>i62.76.4.0/23 [...] *>i62.76.6.0/23 [...] *>i62.76.8.0/24 [...] *>i62.76.122.0/24 [...] *>i62.76.124.0/23 [...] *>i62.76.128.0/23 [...] *>i62.76.130.0/24 [...] *>i62.76.136.0/23 [...] *>i62.76.144.0/21 [...]
In this case the 62.76/16 block was allocated to "ROSNIIROS Russian Institute for Public Networks" who have assigned smaller blocks to various organisations. Some of the corresponding routes may be aggregatable but others may not -- there seems to be a proliferation of autonomous systems in that part of the world, many announcing very small numbers of routes and not all even multi-homed... James