[routing-wg] Issue affecting rsync RPKI repository fetching

Dear Ties, group,

Thank you for the outline.

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 02:33:37PM +0200, Ties de Kock wrote:
> The RPKI application does not support writing the complete repository to disk
> for each state (as needed for spooling the repository as proposed in scripts).
> Synchronously writing every state of the repository to disk is not feasible,
> given our update frequency and repository size. Functionality for
> asynchronously writing the repository to disk needs to be developed. We have two
> paths to develop this:
> - The first is a new daemon that writes to disk from the database state at a set interval.
> - The second one is using RRDP as a source of truth and writing the repository to disk.
> Furthermore, we would need to migrate the storage from NFS to have faster writes.
> 
> Both approaches need an extended period for validation and we are not able to
> deploy these within a few weeks. The latter approach (using RRDP) has less risk
> and is the option we are aiming for at the moment. We plan to release the new
> publication infrastructure in Q2/Q3 2021 and hope to migrate earlier.

The "RRDP as source of truth" approach indeed seems the more appealing
(and simpler!) option. I would encourage the NCC to follow that path.

In the mean time, can https://www.ripe.net/support/service-announcements/service-announcements/current
be updated to reflect that there are known race conditions and problems
with the RIPE NCC RSYNC service?

Are there any other tweaks the NCC can think of that reduce the
operational pain? Maybe increasing the publication interval?

Kind regards,

Job