All-- Many thanks to those who responsed to our NSFNET Reports Survey last July. As part of this review process, we have developed two new flavors of machine-readable reports which contain all the information about nets that we keep. Because of the implementation of CIDR this fall, all current reports that include net information will change; if you will need to modify any of your programs because of these changes, you might consider modifying them to use the new reports that were designed for machine parsing. We have also expanded the syntax recognized by the "whois" server on prdb.merit.edu, so you can run any of our prdb "clients" without compiling those clients on your own machine. Both these services are described below. Also, the mail group "db-disc@merit.edu" which was requested in the Sprint/Reston Regional Techs meeting does exist, and has the following initial membership (besides Merit folks):
250-<tom@cic.net> 250-<curtis@ans.net> 250-<klong@sura.net> 250-<bostwick@es.net> 250-<prue@ISI.EDU> 250-<CUNNINGHAM@B.PSC.EDU> 250-<MARTIN@CEARN.cern.ch> 250-<hwb@upeksa.sdsc.edu> 250-<asp@uunet.uu.net> 250-<MAP@BBN.Com> 250-<cjw@magnolia.Stanford.EDU> 250-<sharad@ans.net> 250 <"| /usr/local/etc/archiver db-disc/db-disclog">
These are folks who either answered the survey, or who have indicated interest in detailed discussion of NSFNET PRDB information dissemination. This announcement message has been sent to db-disc with a bcc to regional-techs and nwg, so that any replies will go only to the discussion list. If you would like to be added to this list, please reply to "list-admin@ merit.edu" or to me. All discussion will be archived for anonymous ftp on merit.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Survey Results. =================== Generally, there seem to be a few net reports and one AS report that are widely and frequently used. We will continue to support these (though their formats will need to be modified when we start supporting CIDR this fall). There were also several calls for more complete information, and for versions of the reports more easily suitable for machine parsing, so we have come up with "unload" and "tagged" reports to meet these needs. The New Net Reports =================== There are now two new reports available on nis.merit.edu:nsfnet/ announced.networks . "nets.tag.now" describes all the nets in the PRDB database in a "tagged" format: ----nets.tag.now:
netnum: 6 prefixlen: 8 netname: YPG-NET homeas: aup: N netcc: US orgstate: AZ orgtype: orgaddr: Army Information Systems Center, USAISC, Yuma Proving Ground, Yuma, AZ 85365-9102, USA update: 93/02/08 active: 90/01/21 aslist: 1:568 2:19
"nets.unl.now" presents the same information in an "unload" format: one network per line, with fields separated by a pipe character. This format is designed for easy building of tools; it can also be loaded directly into databases or spreadsheet programs. "nets.doc" documents this format, and gives examples of trivial awk scripts that can be used to extract information from this packed representation: -----nets.doc:
1 - IP Number 2 - Prefix Length 3 - Net Name 4 - Home AS 5 - AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy) 6 - Net Country Code 7 - State of US (or empty field) 8 - Organization Type (Carnegie Code if Educational) 9 - Organizational Address 10 - Date of last modification of Org Address 11 - Original date of addition to NSFNET 12 - NSFNET (AS 690) Announcement List [Metric:AS(peer) Metric:AS ...]
Useful UNIX utilities: To sort by field 3: sort -t\| +2 < nets.unl.now To "grep" for only "non-US" nets: awk -F\| '\$6!="US"' < nets.unl.now To print only fields 1,3: awk -F\| '{printf "%s %s\n",$1,$3}' <nets.unl.now
To do all of the above: sort -t\| +2 <nets.unl.now | awk -F\| '$6!="US"{printf "%s %s\n",$1,$3}'
----nets.unl.now:
6|8|YPG-NET||N|US|AZ||Army Information Systems Center, USAISC, Yuma Proving Ground, Yuma, AZ 85365-9102, USA|93/02/08|90/01/21|1:568 2:19 | 7|8|EDN-TEMP||N|US|VA||Defense Communications, Engineering Center, 1860 Wiehle Avenue, Reston, VA 22090, USA|93/06/01|90/06/20|1:701 2:702 | 8|8|BBNCCNET||A|US|MA||Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., 70 Fawcett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA|93/06/15|89/06/21|2:281 3:701 |
The "Prefix Length" field is in anticipation of CIDR changes this fall. The Organizational Address is currently listed in a single string, which is the way it is internally stored in the PRDB today. Issues about parsings of organizational addresses are being discussed as part of the Shared Whois project--let me know if you have concerns about these kinds of parsings. Whois Access to the Same Information ==================================== Last March, Merit announced a set of "prdbshow" clients that can be used to obtain realtime information (merit.edu:/pub/src/prdbshow.tar.Z). A few people had trouble compiling the clients, or preferred not to do so. To make this functionality more widely available, you can now run the prdbshow clients through "whois":
merit.edu% whois -h prdb.merit.edu 'shownet 35' 35 1:237 2:233 3:266 4:267 5:1225 merit.edu%
Of course, this slightly verbose syntax can be covered with aliases or scripts. We are revising our prdbshow* distribution to include as set of two-line scripts to support this. Current documentation for this whole service may be obtained with the command: whois -h prdb.merit.edu help The Futures of the Current Reports: =================================== Of the current reports, there were three network reports and one AS report that had widespread usage: net-comp.now ans-core.now country.now as-as.now We will continue supporting these reports. (Note though that we will be forced to change the format of these reports sometime this fall when we move to CIDR-type net addresses. If you modify your programs to use the new reports now, you will be immune from these changes to the old reports). Some reports were not mentioned as being used by anyone. We would like to phase these reports out, since all this information is now available in several more concise and convenient ways. These reports include: net.net-now net.ter-now nets.as_### yymmdd.as_### as-gw.now nss-gw.now If there are no objections from this group to phasing these reports out, then we will begin inserting messages into these reports about their coming demise, including an email address to protest to. After a couple of months we would then discontinue producing these reports. There were a few other reports that were used by only a single person, specifically: gate-gw.now netcount.now non-us.now nss-as.now as-site.now I would like to work with these individuals to see if we can meet their needs with the new access to the whois and prdbshow clients, and to the new reports; perhaps with the help of some short custom unix scripts. If there are others who would like help creating custom scripts to meet specific needs, please send me a message. It should be very easy to write simple scripts to extract information from the new reports. I'd be happy to write some of these or to help folks write them. Dale Johnson Network Management Systems Merit Network, Inc.