route-views and ris provide pretty good views of route propagation.
but, as you seem to understand, that's only half the story. luckily, the other, more useful, half is easily testable if arin/cymru would just follow the long-discussed path.
yep, that's clear. routing and firewalling may be orthogonal. obviously, without routing there is no forwarding and *many* people filtered announcements within 69/8. i acknowledge that many people also accepted the route and filtered traffic. my point was (as should have been clear) that the right place to *start* is routing. the other point i was making, about which i should have been clearer, is that willy-nilly pinging from random places won't really help much, as is probably obvious. it can identify gross unreachability problems but it cannot give a clear picture of unreachability across all of routed space (unless your willy-nilly sample happens to evenly cover all of routed address space--a neat trick!). an announcement to some mailing list asking whoever happens to be a member (and paying attention, with free time on her hands) to ping some addresses (or http or whtever) will also not give a complete picture. this has probably already been thought-out, but outbound reachability testing *from* the address block to a representative spread of addressing makes much more sense and would be much more indicative of forwarding (versus routing) problems, and would do so with some method and statistical reliability. presumably that is coming and just hasn't been discussed or carried out yet. for what it's worth, these three /20s appear to have no systematic unreachability problems across renesys's peerset. the first announcement we saw were quite some time ago: 22:37:43 UTC 22 Aug 2005 with paths ending 174 23028 36666 all three /20s showed up for *one* peer with a path that looked like that for almost 5 days while 23028 worked on allowing their upstreams to accept the announcement (reasonable speculation, not observed fact). 3561 starts accepting the announcements on 05:47 UTC 27 Aug 2005. a couple of other major networks on the 30th, and 31st August. lots of people follow suit the 2nd november, and then slow propagation throughout renesys's peerset. the most recent peer of renesys's peers to finally accept those /20s did so on at 00:08 UTC 21 Sep 2005 (today or tomorrow, depending on where and when you read this). i'm guessing that routeviews and ripe ris data have similar findings, although i have not checked them (left as an exercise to the reader? :-) i'd be happy to provide more detail if it seems useful. t. -- _____________________________________________________________________ todd underwood director of operations & security renesys - interdomain intelligence todd@renesys.com www.renesys.com