High-level thoughts (Tuesday edition)

Daniel, Tony,

  What great response last night!  Thanks!

  We're continuing to try to come up to speed on your system.  We've
got a few very general questions, some architectural thoughts, and a
few specific things to ask you, too.

  On the general side, we've got the following objectives for this 
routing pilot project:

      - Seamless interoperation with RIPE tools across all ASs
      - Get the pilot up extremely quickly
		Then, for the longer run:
      - Share code, projects, etc. with RIPE as appropriate
      - (long term) maintain ability of RIPE and Merit to add local
		functionality to seve non-mutual requirements.

Would you guys be interested in doing some joint development down the
road, assuming coding needs worked out?

One of the obvious options for us to get RIPE-compatible functionality
running quickly would be for us to take your system and run it here.
At first glance, does that seem like a reasonable plan to you?  Has it
been done before?  (e.g. has anyone else gathered all the pieces
necessary to run a full local RIPE implementation yet?)  Assuming you
are willing, we'd like to grab a copy of your stuff and see how far we
can get at bringing it up tomorrow.  I know the pr*tools are available
for anonymous FTP.  Is the full source there as well?  If not, is there
a way we could get at the code?  (A guest account, or some such?)

Also, to get some feeling and operational practice in this, we thought
it might be useful for us to join the RIPE db as an NSP.  Some day not
too far away we'll want to get AS 690 represented (at least as much as
possible), but for now we wondered if we could register as AS 689 (the
NSFNET Test Net AS).  This would let us try entering various policy
descriptions, nets, etc., , but it should not interfere much with
anybody's actual processing since none of your ASs will have any
interactions with 689.  Would that be ok?  How can we set this up?
Any cautions about kinds of data not to enter?  (Is there any
standard text you send to new ASs who would like to register with you?)

We've just come across RIPE-108, which seems like a pretty crucial
document for us to read to understand your system.  Are there others
you'd point us to?  (besides RIPE-81++?)

More specific thoughts follow soon...     

Thanks,
-Dale



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