Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:12:39 -0500 From: Justin Shore <justin@justinshore.com>
Jared Mauch wrote:
I've come to the conclusion that if someone put a nice web2.0+ interface on creating and managing these objects it would be a lot easier.
I've looked into IRR several times, usually after events like PCCW. Each time the amount of work to 1) figure out how to implement IRR and 2) actually implementing it far outweighed the benefit of doing it for my network. I would love to implement it and looking towards the future I will someday have to. Until it becomes much easier to do so, I don't foresee smaller SPs like myself allocating the necessary resources to an IRR project until we're forced to because of our individual growth or an idiot PCCW-type event that generates lots of bad PR.
While a web 2.0 app would be very nice, it's really not that hard to do now. You do need the IRRToolSet or something similar. the IRRToolSet has languished for a long time and was getting harder and harder to keep running, but the move to sourceforge and the massive number of updates and clean ups should soon result in a 5.0 release that builds cleanly on most Unix/Linux platforms with a modern C++ compiler. Once that happens, it's really pretty simple to use the IRR for this sort of thing and, while the IRR data quality is pretty poor, it's a vast improvement over crossing your fingers and sticking your head in the sand. Except for the ugliness of the Perl I wrote well over a decade ago (when I was just learning Perl), I'd try to talk the powers that be into allowing me to release it as an example, but the relevant code is really, really trivial. (Not that government would let me without vast quantities of paperwork.) -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751