Let me play Devil's Advocate here for a moment...
What no horns? No cloven hooves? No pointy tail?
Why do you need a -policy-?
Easy, My policy is to not propogate any customer routes unless they are properly registered in the routing registry. But how do I check that I have a "working" BGP peer up unless I can actually exchange a route? Here the testroute comes in real handy.
Why do you need anything other than what 1597 already says?
See above. And besides, 192.0.2.0 is not part of RFC 1597.
1597 was VERY careful to be general and leave implementation of policy up to the users. The RA, NAPs, IXs, and others do not need to concern themselves with how or when these suggestions are implemented.
Yup.
The thing to understand is that the 1597 network addresses are not unique throughout the entire Internet. There use and administration is done on a local basis, but it behoves us to not get parochial about the term local.
Yup
Actually, there's a really interesting point here that's about to give you a big whopping ulcer. I hate to do this to you but...
Not a problem
You, as RA, need to support your customer's routing policies.
Darn! I was in it for the praise and adoration
If, for instance, someone at Sprint and someone at MCI get together and decide jointly that they want to share network 10 "privately" for their BGP loopbacks or their porno FTP servers, they could form the Sprint/MCI net-10 consortium and you'd need to carry an advertisement for net 10 in your RA database so the two sites could exchange routes.
Here's where the fun comes in... now say Alternet and PSI get together and want to share network 10 "privately" for their BGP loopbacks or their porno FTP sites and form the Alternet/PSI net-10 consortium...
You forgot the guys who register their net10 with a policy of "don't route per RFC 1597. I don't think this is a problem in the RADB. We can take this offline to reduce my public exposure.
The long and the short of it is that as RA, not only do you need to not block 1597 advertisements in your database, you need to correctly implement virtual private networking for 1597 advertisements.
Yup again.
Remember Bill, that the RA needs to not get bogged down by parochial definitions of "local."
Only when it pertains directly to the RA maintained route servers.
I bet now you're wishing you hadn't brought this up and got me thinking... Sorry...I'll buy you a drink in Danvers to make it up to you.
Nope, this is really good. See you in Danvers... :) --bill