[db-wg] Foreign ROUTE objects in RIPE Database - final decision?

Sascha Luck [ml] wrote:
> How does this fact falsify the fact that cross-RIR route: objects
> exist? Those have to be in *some* irrdb and as long as a
> cross-RIR irrdb doesn't exist, part of the data will be
> non-authenticated...

it doesn't say anything about cross-RIR route: objects, and you're
correct to point out that parsing IRRDB objects is difficult to do well.

There are a couple of different approaches which we have found to work
reasonably well in practice.  One is to use whois.radb.net and carefully
specify the source: list.  Another would be to run your own private
whois server and get NTRM copies of the IRRDBs that you're interested in.

Another still (the version used in recent versions of IXP Manager) is to
poll the IRRDBs for the list of objects you're interested in, then
select them in a local db of some form. This gives very high
performance, high flexibility / functionality, but comes at a cost of
more coding.

Defaulting to using whois.radb.net is a reasonable compromise, but it
has its limitations.

In other words, removing foreign route objects from any specific irrdb
doesn't change any requirements for your irrdb code, because if you're
pulling in irrdb prefix lists from arbitrary ASNs, there is already a
requirement to poll multiple irrdbs.

If your irrdb polling mechanism doesn't handle this, and doesn't support
the option to have per-peer IRRDB policies (for both whois servers and
source: specifications), it will break.  We tried it and ran that
particular boat up on the rocks.

Nick