[ am i going to regret cross-posting? ] a friend raised in private the question of whether the dns could be used instead of rpsl. essentially, dns does not search down-tree for you. it only answers exact specific queries. for some reason lost in time, well at least lost in my mind, rpsl servers give you the nearest enclosing object. e.g., if i query for the ip address of psg.com, 147.28.0.62, i get the encompassing inetnum: object. ryuu.rg.net:/Users/randy> whois -h whois.ripe.net 147.28.0.62 inetnum: 147.28.0.0 - 147.28.31.255 netname: RGNET-RSCH-147-0 country: EE org: ORG-RO47-RIPE admin-c: RB45695-RIPE tech-c: RB45695-RIPE abuse-c: AR52766-RIPE status: LEGACY mnt-by: MAINT-RGNET remarks: Geofeed https://rg.net/geofeed created: 2020-09-03T22:23:37Z last-modified: 2020-09-13T20:16:05Z source: RIPE # Filtered and now i know not to query further in the range 147.28.0.0/19. note the geofeed pointer is not at the exact ip, or at the /24, or at the /16. and have fun getting the magic of knowing it is the /19 into the dns. one does not want to query the dns for an RR 62.0.28.147.in-addr.arpa because, for this to be useful, either o you need the geoloc data with every PTR record (think ipv6 and slaac) o you need some non-existent magic to get you the geoloc data for some unspecified less specific granularity if netflix wants to collect the geofeeds once a month. do we propose they dns query all ipv4 and ipv6 host addresses? i suspect there are also cultural issues. in most isps of scale, dns is close to customer service, a different 'silo' from provisioning. rpsl not so much. i am sure massimo is learning more about the silos in ntt than he would care to. but he was able to deploy this hack in a week. i would bet that he could never get a dns hack deployed. possibly amusing tangential note: we once tried to do rpki in the dns, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bates-bgp4-nlri-orig-verif-00 aside from other issues, dns only allows a single delegation, which would preclude two owners in a make before break transition. randy