Editor's Note: This actually looks like the BOF Session to me, but I didn't shoot the pictures:-)
Route servers hear all route announcements and therefore can produce information about route flapping.
Route servers need lots of memory (512M) and disk, but not much CPU. The Route Servers are now being privately funded by digital, MFS(now WorldCom), NETRAIL, AMERITECH, and PAC*BELL. This work has all been done since October of last year.
Bill Manning has slides on his laptop, but it doesn’t work.
The RA Route servers are coming off-line. Merit is starting the commercial service. The tools are publicly available. Merit will continue to run RADB part of IRR. ISI will continue to do software development (RAToolSet or RATS, RTConfig, and the RSd [Route Server Daemon]).
New things from ISIJohn Stewart with ISI: What is the dIRR?
FTP datafiles around doesn’t really work (and is not scalable). One proposal does do coherency.
Matthew Kaufman: Is there any work being done on layer 2 reachability in the route server? Without this, it makes it hard to really make use of route servers since they may be telling folks about routes that are not valid since the router is not reachable via layer 2.
John Hawkinson - He suggests that source routing ping would provide reachability.
John Khuon from ISI responds: I did try this, but some folks don’t permit source routing ping. We could add knobs to BGP for this, but Bill Manning thinks that is a bad idea.