The Routing Arbiter project is funded by a contract from the National Science Foundation to a team from ISI, IBM, Merit and the University of Michigan, that lasts from June 1994 until April 1999. ISI & IBM do the RA server. Merit does the operation of the database and other components.
Route Server Software was developed by IBM, which was adapted from GateD 3.5. There was extensive modifications to support per-ISP routing tables. Code is available. Concept documents are available
Various tools are available. PEVAL is used to take RIPE-181 expressions and transforms them into a cannonical form. RTCONFIG is used to generate router configurations from RIPE-181 expressions. VIEWGEN reads policies from all providers in the NAPS and decides the number views that are needed and associates policies with each view.
Six route servers are deployed. Two are at MAE-EAST, and one each at the primary NAPs and MAE-WEST.
RADB is based on RIPE-181. There are three other registries: RIPE-NCC, InternetMCI and CA*NET. The combined group is called the IRR. RR users should only have to register in one of these. There has been some difficulties with this.
The database can be queried via whois. PRIDE provided the basis for this server.
All the registries have whois servers and archive sites.
whois host archive URL
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RADB whois.ra.net ftp://ftp.ra.net/pub/radb/dbase/radb.db.gz
RIPE-NCC whois.ripe.net ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/ripe.db.gz
InternetMCI whois.mci.net ftp://ftp.mci.net/pub/rr/mci.db.gz
CA*NET whois.canet.ca ftp://ftp.canet.ca/canet/crcd/canet.db
Routing Engineering is run by Merit Networks. Most of the work has been in helping architecture for the ATM NAPS. This includes addressing plans and analyizing routing stability.
The University of Michigan has a routing operations center that watches after the Route Servers.
Statistics are being collected. This includes number of packets, delay, and packet loss.
Central Networking runs on a Sun Sparcstation.
RA has been discussed in various community forums.
There are about 19,000 Routes known to the Route Server at MAE-EAST.
Any new software is staged to a test route server before it is deployed into production.
The gated log is archived each day. The number of BGP session
lost is very low. Generally, the number lost is one per day.
At each NAP, there is not a large number of peering session in production. Jessica would like to see more.
There are a number of features supported by the RS. More features are being planned.
How does one establish a peer? Those on the NAPS/MAEs have a procedure to follow.
There are 45 ASes registered as of last Friday.
The RA can facilitate the Multi-Lateral Peering Agreement(MPLA) at the Chicago NAP. The RS can peer with everyone in MLPA and facilitate routing exchange that group.
The community can help by registering their policy in the IRR and keep the information up-to-date.
The RS is AS based and can be transparent in terms of peering to any other ASes.
Will there be an AS MACRO for the MLPA? There are a number of approaches.
Curtis from ANS said that the AS690 advisory line is still needed, but that will be short term. There are problems running some of the RIPE and Merit code on AIX.
Daniel from RIPE says that registry in only one registry is preferred. Some organizations may require specific registration in a particular RR.