rwhois delegation impact

[William Leibzon]

Rwhois is used solely to provide information on ip allocations and 
assignments made by your ISP to your customers - it is same as if
you SWIPed those blocks to ARIN for them to appear directly in arin
whois but rwhois is more flexible in that protocol could be used to
integrate the assignment database directly to your customer database
(which might not be running rwhois server). What you enter in rwhois
will not have any effect on routing.

Routing registries is used by ISPs to provide information to other ISPs
about which routes they intend to announce in BGP and which ASNs originate
those routes. Routing registry is running on whois but has its own 
data format called RPSL. The main routing registries are RIPE and
MERIT RADB (see www.radb.net). Some large ISPs (Verio, C&W - now Savvis) 
setup their own RR servers and RR data is primarily used for building BGP 
and related access lists in automated way for core peering infrastructure.

You are welcome to also setup your own RR server (just download ripe whois
server software and read documentation it has) but don't expect that other
ISPs will actually use it or know to look it up when accepting you routes 
(although I had proposal at ARIN that would allow for ISP to specify which
RR server it is using as part or ReassignmentServer field under ARIN ASN 
whois - currently its improperly specifying rwhois servers, but those have 
no data on ASNs).

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Kyle Sexton wrote:

> William,
>
> There is a good chance I'm confusing many things. :)  I've never
> before setup an rwhois server, so I guess I'm not really sure what the
> implications of the delegation are.  I've been trying to follow a
> number of guides but pretty much used this one:
>
> http://www.unixadmin.cc/rwhois/rwhois-ip-howto.html
>
> I've gotten all the way through it without any major issues, but am
> worried that a small configuration problem may lead to problems.  Does
> rwhois not affect the routing of traffic at all?
>
> Thanks,
> Kyle
>
> On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 13:25:21 -0800 (PST), William Leibzon
> <william at completewhois.com> wrote:
>>
>> Are you by any chance mixing/confusing rwhois with rr (routing registry)
>> whois concepts?
>>
>> On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Kyle Sexton wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>> I've been tasked with implementing an rwhois server where I work and
>>> am concerned about the final ARIN delegation step  What is the
>>> potential impact to the IPs that we delegate to our new rwhois server
>>> if something is setup incorrectly?  Is there any possibility that an
>>> improperly configured rwhois server could cause a loss of traffic to
>>> that entire IP block?
>>>
>>> I'm also looking for ways to verify that my configuration is correct.
>>> Should the output I get from my rwhois client exactly match the ARIN
>>> output for the same IP block?
>>>
>>> Thanks for your time,
>>> Kyle
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Rwhois mailing list
>>> Rwhois at rwhois.net
>>> https://lists.verisignlabs.com/mailman/listinfo/rwhois

---
William Leibzon
   mailto: william at completewhois.com
Anti-Spam and Email Security Research Worksite:
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Whois & DNS Network Investigation Tools:
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