In message <Pine.SUN.3.91.951220005149.13779L-100000@tigger.jvnc.net>, Gordon C ook writes: On Sunday the 17th of December Sean Doran stated pretty clearly why Sprint wasn't using the Routing Arbiter database. I am very surprised that neither Bill Manning or Elise Gerich or anyone else involved with the project has so far come back and said no...Sean....your interpretation was wrong. Here is what we did. And we did this because........ Does the lack of response from the Routing arbiter to Sean mean that it has no problems with Sean's description of what it did and why it did it? I offer the theory that the lack of response was due primarily to people who have real work to do. To refresh folk's minds, here is what Sean said: The principal problem is that the RSes and the whole IRR are only as good as the databases are, and the bulk of the RADB was populated from the wrong source. Rather than doing what I would consider the correct thing -- that is, watching peerings between the RSes and the providers participating in the various RS tests and tracking down all the information from the IRR based on what was seen there, verifying routing policies with end sites -- they started with the PRDB and hoped that fate would cause the RADB to become more correct. The information taken from the PRDB was the prefix itself, contact information, and the AS690 advisory fields. The origin AS was not in the PRDB. This was instead populated by asking people to register the correct origin AS or by observed AS paths where there was no response. The origin AS fields are largely incorrect due to truncated AS paths which results from using the exact technique that Sean prescribes, looking at the routing table for a source of information. The AS690 advisories were also largely incorrect due to the topology changes that occurred during NSFNET transition not being reflected. This was also largely due to the AS690 advisory method of configuration becoming increasingly unwieldy as the network has grown. The AS690 advisories are now gone. ANS policy is now entirely expressed in the AS690 aut-num (the authoritative aut-num is in the database named "anstest" on configs.ans.net). The move to clean up ANS policy (greatly reducing inconsistencies and simplifying the policy) is underway and making good progress (for example, in the last 7 days the size of the AS690 aut-num object was reduced by about 4,000 lines due to simplifications of policy and increased use of BGP4 MED). To be brief and blunt, the RA team started with information explicitly designed to PREVENT connectivity between "bad" (evil, greedy, commercial) networks and "good" networks which would be AUP compliant. I'd think common sense would indicate doing some extra (and well paid) work to instead start off with something approaching a model of the reality of interconnectivity. This is pure flamage. The only thing the AUP reflected in the RADB was whether the comm-list for a route contained the community COMM_NSFNET was set. Since no one uses that community for anything (that I'm, aware of), it has no effect. A lot of the route objects were picked up simply from route dumps at the CIX, when ANS policy was to automatically register in the PRDB any route found at the CIX as a commercial only route with CIX connectivity only. That was hardly designed to prevent connectivity. Moreover, another disappointment is that one could easily assert that a strong reason for using the PRDB as the source of information from day #1 was that MERIT was already spending its resources maintaining that database and toolset in a deal with ANS to keep ANS's network routing working much the same way during the many months while they figured out how to move on from the end of the NSFNET backbone service. ANS did and still does want to maintain the most reliable routing possible toward anyone willing to register accurate information in the IRR. The only choices for starting the database was to start empty or start with the best information available at the time. In short, I think the chief failing of the RADB is not the toolset, the concept, or the long-term plan, all of which make some to alot of sense. Instead, what seems to have killed it dead is that the RA was too busy to commit the *serious* effort it would have taken to populate the RADB with information from reality in the first place. I don't see how Sean expects the RA to populate contact information, origin AS, maintainance authorization and notification fields, AS connectivity, based on seeing an BGP route in a routing table. I also don't think Sean is entirely representing Sprint, since others at Sprint are populating information so their customers get connectivity. The RA is working on a lot of analysis tools. Among them are verification tools to determine whether what is observed in BGP updates is feasible based on what is present in the IRR. The attempt is being made to make entering information as easy as possible for those who do not wish to fully participate. When a new AS appears, an aut-num object should be entered so people have a basis for determining backup paths in addition to a primary path. If new prefixes appear, all that needs to be registered to get routing right is the prefix and origin AS. Correct contact information is a nice idea too, be we can route without it if we have to. There are many parties contributing toward improving the accuracy of the IRR, whether by developing better tools or by adding information or correcting information for which they are authoritative. The tools right now are primarily coming out of the RA. There are also those who are not contributing to improving the accuracy of the IRR or even worse persistantly whining about it or flaming others who are. Those people doing real work are trying hard to just ignore those who are whining and flaming. ******************************************************************** Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher Subscriptions: Individ-ascii $85 The COOK Report on Internet Individ. hard copy $150 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 Small Corp & Gov't $200 (609) 882-2572 Corporate $350 Internet: cook@cookreport.com Corporate Site Lic. $650 Web: http://pobox.com/cook/ Newly expanded COOK Report Web Pages ******************************************************************** Curtis