reasonable questions. my general reaction to your message
is that the irr could be used for more things than it is
currently *if* the information were more accurate. it's
logical to ask "do we *need* those 'more things?'" one
argument is "apparently not, because the internet is
working without them." but at the same time, as the net
continues to grow and the routing continues to become more
complex (e.g., with increasing layers of aggregation),
having a database of routing information and tools which
can analyze that routing information seems like A Good
Thing
i come from a provider which believes in the irr. but at
this point i think we "believe in it" for what we use it
for: route-filtering our bgp customers in order to provide
a sanity check before passing those routes onto the global
internet. we think that's important, and we think that by
doing this we are being a responsible member of the global
internet routing system (especially given our size)
it *is* worth noting that we have local-use stuff in our
registry to do two things. first is automatic config of
static routes. second is to track all of our bgp peers (in
a lot more practical detail than either inet-rtr objects or
as-in/as-out/interas-in/interas-out attributes in aut-num
objects). so we most definitely "believe in" those uses as
well
we are interested in some of the uses of the irr that others
have proposed and are using (e.g., curtis has proposed some
interesting uses, and the raconfig tool is actively being
used by at least one provider), though we haven't yet chosen
to dedicate resources to those uses ourselves
so having said all of that, what's an irr violation? for us
an "irr violation" would be that for some reason we're not
accepting a route from a customer. in those cases that
customer calls us and we work with them to fix the problem.
the important point being that we think our use of the
registry, even if considered a "violation" by some stats-
collection system elsewhere on the net, results in our AS
being a more stable part of the global routing system
so working to get rid of "violations" is a good thing
because it might usher in some other very helpful uses of
the registry. but in the meantime, keep in mind that even
though one person may call an irr entry a "violation"
because of the way *they* use the irr, other people may be
using that entry to help keep the routing system stable
my US$0.02
/jws