Hi. I just sent this report to Ann Cooper for the Internet Monthly Report. Thought it would be of general interest. Mark Merit/NSFNET Internet Engineering Report October 1993 Mark Knopper This report contains a summary of recent activities of Merit's Internet Engineering Group. These include development of capabilities in the Policy Routing Database system to represent, generate NSFNET/ANS backbone configuration files, and test new software, for deployment of the CIDR and BGP-4 routing architecture. Additionally, Merit staff have made progress on implementation of a "CIDR Aggregate Registry", described in RFC 1482, for registration of aggregated routing information between providers. In early October, Merit hosted a meeting of the Regional-Techs group, which discussed a number of topics related to coordination among providers for CIDR deployment and registration of routing information. The Shared Whois Project (SWIP) is an ongoing joint project between InterNIC, RIPE NCC and Merit. Policy Routing Database Changes and CIDR Deployment In preparation for deployment of the GateD routing daemon on the ANS backbone, supporting the BGP-4 protocol for CIDR, changes were completed in the Merit/NSFNET PRDB in order to support inbound acceptance and outbound announcement of route aggregates. The PRDB can now generate GateD configuration files for the ANSNET backbone. These files can include configuration for the new BGP-4 features. Merit engineers are cooperating with the ANS backbone engineering staff in testing GateD operation on the T3 research network, and in the initial deployment of the new version of GateD on the Washington DC to Geneva, Switzerland circuit. The initial production deployment of the PRDB changes for CIDR will include a change in the notation of network numbers to the classless format ("x.x.x/len"). This change will be visible to all external users of whois or the PRDB reports. The whois server commands will start using the new notation, and ans_core.now, country.now, and net-comp.now will be replaced with their new versions (currently produced as ans_core.cidr, country.cidr, and net-comp.cidr). Prefix lengths of 8, 16, or 24 will be put into the PRDB for all existing nets with classes A, B and C respectively. The Network Announcement Change Request (NACR) templates, both e-mail and interactive client interfaces, will be changed to accept aggregated announcements. Once GateD is deployed, BGP-4 will be supported initially without announcing or accepting aggregated routes, however. After BGP-4 appears to be stable, controlled experiments with aggregation will be done in cooperation with regional and midlevel networks. Still to be implemented in the database is the "proxy aggregation" as described in RFC 1482. In this case the backbone can be configured to aggregate on behalf of the regional network in response to the announcement of one or a set of network numbers comprising the total aggregate. This feature will be supported by the time NACR support for aggregation is made available. CIDR Aggregate Registry Changes to the Aggregate Registry function described in RFC 1482 were made at the October Regional-Techs meeting. The original proposed functionality was split into a Aggregate Registry (one entry per aggregate, with source AS) and a possible separate Routed Net registry giving AS topology with aggregate announcements. Initially these registries will list only network prefixes which are not class A/B/C nets, but the longer term goal is to allow all nets regardless of class to be returned by the same server. The Aggregate Registry project will be implemented first as it is a relatively straightforward project, with the Routed Net Registry project being implemented next. It is expected that these registries will be of assistance in the global BGP-4 tunnel testbed led by Andrew Partan and Peter Lothberg. Regional-Techs Meeting A meeting of the Regional-Techs group was held in Ann Arbor on October 4-5. The focus of the meeting was to discuss CIDR Deployment, routing registration, and NSFNET transition issues with respect to coordination among network providers. The group decided that it will be important to broaden its scope to include any interested network providers rather than restrict the discussion to NSFNET-attached regionals and midlevels. It was decided that for the foreseeable future, Merit will continue to host the group, but meetings may be held at different locations with other network provider sponsors. A suggestion for a new name for the group was North American Network Operators Group, though a name was not finalized and is open to discussion. A summary of the meeting is available for anonymous ftp: merit.edu:pub/nsfnet/regional-techs/1093/rtechs.ps SWIP Project The Shared Whois Project is a joint project between Merit, RIPE NCC and InterNIC to synchronize data among the Internet numbering and routing registries, and implement various databases and implement automatic update procedures. It is a goal of the three organizations to synchronize data by April, 1994 and begin to use the update procedures at that time. A working document can be found in merit.edu:pub/nsfnet/swip/swip.ps