[routing-wg] Who uses the RIPE IRR and for what?

Hi Ronald,

> I am inclined to wonder who is actually using all of that
> route information in the RIPE DB, and what on earth they could be using
> it for.

That is a very good question.

RPSL is a means of documenting an autonomous system's routing policy.  It can be used in many ways.

It might be used to build router configurations and filter lists, but usually only towards the 'edge' and only among a limited set of service providers (we use an internal IRR for building our customer filter lists).

It might be used to model inter-domain relationships, but that way you're modelling the documentation rather than the actual relationships.

It might be used to generate ASCII art.

As with all forms of documentation, it accumulates cruft.  I'm actually quite encouraged by your figures.  I wonder if some of them might be skewed slightly by the presence of multiple route entries in the database though?  An ugly pipleline of unix commands suggests that 10,098 routes in your analysis file have 2 entries, 408 routes have three entries, 15 routes have four entries, one route has six entries and five routes have over 30 entries each.

224224  1
10098  2
 408  3
  15  4
   1  6
   1 32
   4 37

I've not used the DNS interface to route-views, but if it only returns a single entry per query, then for all of the routes with multiple route objects, all but one of them will be inconsistent in your analysis, even if the route is advertised (say for purposes of quick-and-easy multihoming) by multiple ASNs.

To pick one at random:

91.207.202.0/23 12968 50625
91.207.202.0/23 
91.207.202.0/23 12741 50625

There are three route: objects, one of which is correct, but two are either outdated, or may be there for multihoming.

Looking at RIPEstat's routing history:
<https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=91.207.202.0%2F23>

Shows it was announced by AS12968 from ~2008 to ~2010, and then by AS50625 since then.  The other route object, AS12741, was only created on the 29th October, so could be a migration about to happen.

That may not be an appreciable dent in your near-30,000 inconsistencies, but it might be some of them, and might suggest you're entering a murky world.

Cheers,
Rob