North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Lazy Engineers and Viable Excuses

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Tue Aug 26 05:16:31 2003 

On Monday, 25 August 2003, at 21:32PM, Jared Mauch wrote:


	You of course are correct with the trusting of the data, but
we are in a somewhat of a chicken and egg situation.  If people don't
trust the IRR, they don't filter on it, and then the data is
allowed to get out of date.  But people who maliciously add bogus
(or excessive route objects for example) are easy to track down.  This
is what the maintainer objects are for and why the IRR software keeps
logs of the messages (including headers) that are submitted.
I'm not suggesting that the IRR is not useful. I'm saying that it's important to appreciate what it is good for, and what it is not good for.

For example, it would be unfortunate if an ISP used the IRR to build prefix filters for customers as a replacement for a manual scheme in which updates were scrutinised for legitimacy, without an understanding of the implications of the decision.


Joe