Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 14:39:01 -0700 From: "Todd Caine" <todd_caine@eli.net> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu

I've been talking with our router geeks and we have been debating over the usefulness of route registries. We were asked recently on an application for peering if we consult RADB, and our response was, "We have used it although it's not up to date; Why do you use it?", and we received no response. In my experience, I've never heard of any cases where it has been used.

OK. We use it. If you peer with ESnet you must register routes or we will not accept them. If you wonder why, ask Randy Bush. (He has made the pitch for prefix filtering at several NANOG meetings.) I might mention that the AS707 goof had no impact on us because of this filtering. Beyond this, the peering agreement with at least one major network mandates that you register routes if you want to peer with them and that you filter. That all said, we do not filter several major providers for practical reasons. These include UUnet, SprintLink and PSInet.

Who should use Route Registries? Why?

Anyone who peers at public peering points. If you have customers who want to reach any of our sites (and these include most of the major US Government research laboratories), you need to register or use one of the big transit providers which we don't filter. On a more pragmatic level, it provides information to troubleshooting failures. If a customer reports that he can't reach 10.1.1.1 and it's not registered, it takes a LOT longer to figure out who to call to resolve the problem.

Is it worth the time?

The time is pretty minimal as long as you don't get behind. It's just a standard part of setting up a new prefix in our network. Takes only a couple of minutes.

Do people trust that the information is accurate enough to let a route server automate establishing your peering sessions? Is there a limit to the detail that you should provide?

Yes. We do many peerings with providers via the route servers with good results. The only problem is when a provider stops registering his nets and RA peers can't get there. Detail? All you REALLY need is an AS macro defining what ASes you provide transit for, a maintainer object to allow updates to other objects, an inet-rtr object telling the route servers who to talk to and whether to add the RS AS to the path or not, and a record for each prefix you announce. The aut-num object is a good idea, but I don't use it to generate policy, so I don't really care if it is there. I use it most for troubleshooting. Since we are non-commercial, we are probably more willing than most to disclose the details of our peerings.

I've looked at some of the information that other providers have put in the route registry, but nothing really seemed all that useful to us. Would anyone agree or disagree?

It's useful to me and my organization.

Am I missing something here?

I think so. 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

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 02:39:01PM -0700, Todd Caine wrote:

I've been talking with our router geeks and we have been debating over the usefulness of route registries.

You wouldn't be the first. :-)

Who should use Route Registries? Why? Is it worth the time?

In an ideal world, everyone would register their routes, their policies, their contact info and their PGP keys in the RR's. Lets talk reality. For a large number of the people using the routing registries - not necessarily the RADB - they are best used for filtering routing announcements along your edges. In this case, your clients register the routes they are going to be sending you and then you filter based on registered routes. This prevents OOPS. (Note that I said registered routes - not policy.) In the case where you have two providers who wish to exchange a limited set of routing data with each other - i.e. not a transit connection to the whole Internet - you can register your routes and filter each other. Again, this prevents OOPS. To reduce this to its component issues: 1. I want to filter someone. This prevents an accident in their network from be propogated through mine. 2. I need a way to represent the things to filter. RPSL provides a standardized way to do this. 3. Ideally, the people I'm filtering will be able to see my filtering criteria. Possibly, they should be allowed to update the list of the networks we accept from them. IRRd, etc. permits whois access to the policy and the ability to update it. 4. I want to generate my filters programmatically. RtConfig, et alia will do this from IRRd. You can't sanely expect to filter the Internet through IRRd right now, too much of the data is (to quote someone at NANOG) "grot". However, if both parties register the data for their nets in the RADB, it saves them the grief of setting up their own IRR repository. If you setup your own repository and get it mirrored, you provide your info to the Internet at large, possibly helping others solve operational issues with your net. -- Jeffrey Haas - Merit RSng project - jeffhaas@merit.edu