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

In message <BF4E0C89-3D99-4195-B8B1-56F8C1BD96FD at nosc.ja.net>, 
Rob Evans <rhe at nosc.ja.net> wrote:

>> 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.
>...
>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,

Correct.  As I stated, all those 10,098 represent the routes that are
described in the ripe.db.route file but where the _base address_ of
the route is not actually being announced by anyone at present.

>408 routes have
>three entries, 15 routes have four entries, one route has six entries
>and five routes have over 30 entries each.

I hope not!  If you look _only_ at whitespace as field separators, then
the lines in my results file should all have only one, or two or three
fields.  I do grant you that if you were to consider _commas_ also as
field separators, then my results file would appear differently to you,
for example, with respect to these lines:

83.230.32.0/20 35434 {197588,199551}
41.196.30.0/24 24863 {37193,64608,64624}

The above lines... which still do only contain three whitespace separated
fields... look rather funny, relative to all other lines of my results
file, but that is due to an artifact of the way the TXT records within
the asn.routeviews.org zone file have been constructed.  That curly brace
notation, when seen in one of these TXT records of that zone, indicates
that there are multiple ASNs actually announcing the prefix at the present
time.

But as you can see in the above two lines, there are still discrepancies
between what is in the RIPE DB and what ASNs are actually announcing the
routes at the present time.

>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.

You make a good and very valid point.  If I run this analysis again, I
will make an effort to adjust for the exact possibility you just described.

>That may not be an appreciable dent in your near-30,000 inconsistencies...

Correct.  It probably would not.  But I do like to be accurate.


Regards,
rfg