[ris-int] LFT traceroute & RISwhois

Following last week's thread on nanog  re: "traceroute with asn"
the author of LFT traceroute, Victor Oppleman, approached me
offering to add riswhois lookups to the next version of LFT.
(see attached e-mail).

Replacing "one-connection/one-query" lookups to RADB by lookups to RISwhois
was done in a jiffy, but recognizing the potential of RISwhois, he continued
spending time adding support for bulk queries (all queries over one connection)
In this process it turned out there was a need for an additional riswhois
option: a "-1" flag which restricts the output to one and only one route object
per prefix. In combination with -M this flag ensures LFT receives at most
one origin for each IP.

Having checked various prefixes on the Moas page
(http://www.ris.ripe.net/moas/moas.html), it does make sense to
report only 1 origin for each IP: most of the time the second origin
is either one with a handfull of ris peers, or a private AS.

As the required modifications in riswhoisd weren't too difficult and I wanted
to keep the momentum going  ("het ijzer smeden als het heet is"),
I took care of adapting riswhoisd last sunday and for testing purposes
started it on halfweg's port 4444.  Of course, I overlooked the default
deny-all firewall rules, so had to wait 'till monday for Ops to punch a
temporary hole to allow Victor to test his LFT-with-RISwhois development.
(thanks Emil!)

All tests were succesful, so now it's time to follow a proper installation
procedure for new riswhoisd (will create a ticket with ris at ripe.net for that)

Last but not least, I leave you with this quote from Victor:

    [...] I have things to attend to also, but I was just excited seeing as 
    though the RIS is a cool (very cool) service/infrastructure and I think 
    it may be the most trustworthy way of attaining this information with 
    regard to the LFT user community.  I really appreciate what you guys 
    have done and I'm glad we can interoperate.


-- Rene



==========================================

From: Victor Oppleman <victor at oppleman.com>
Subject: LFT & RISwhois
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:48:16 -0700
To: wilhelm at ripe.net

Hi Rene, I just saw this note (a friend just forwarded to me).

The new (as yet unreleased) version of LFT supports querying not only  
the RADB/IRR (formerly the default when using the -A (asn lookup)  
option), but also the pWhoIs project (sounds like the same thing  
RISwhois is doing--we wrote one too) OR Cymru (another source of  
prefix-based whois data).  If you're using pWhoIs or Cymru, it's  
*really* fast because it can grab the ASNs in bulk (one  
connection/query) instead of one connection per each query.

If you'd like, I'm happy to code in an option to use data from your  
project (RISwhois), I just hadn't heard of it yet.  Does it support  
bulk queries or should I do it like I do with RADB/IRR and hit it once  
for each query?

Thanks!


> From: Rene Wilhelm <wilhelm at ripe.net>
> Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 05:57:03 -0700
> To: <bep at whack.org>
> Cc: Ziggy David Lubowa <ziggy at trueafrican.com>, Joe Shen
> <joe_hznm at yahoo.com.sg>, Raymond Dijkxhoorn <raymond at prolocation.net>,  
> NANGO
> <nanog at merit.edu>
> Subject: Re: Traceroute with ASN
>
>
>
>> | Doesnt look like you have to,  below is the link to the tarball
>> |
>> | http://oppleman.com/dl/?file=lft-2.3.tar.gz
>> |
>>
>>
>> According to the doc, it relies on RADB for its info, so it *might*  
>> not be
>> as accurate as an actual BGP feed.
>
> Indeed. That's why we've created "RISwhois" [1], a whois interface to
> the BGP data collected by RIPE NCC's RIS project [2].  You query
> riswhois.ripe.net like you'd query whois.ra.net, but the data
> returned are from active BGP feeds, not manually registered objects.
>
> Since RISwhois uses the same format as RADB, it's trivial to have lft
> consult the RIS BGP tables: simply replace the string "whois.ra.net"
> by "riswhois.ripe.net" in the whois.c file and recompile.
>
> -- Rene  
>
> [1]
> http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-47/presentations/ripe47-eof- 
> riswhois.pd
> f
>
> [2] http://www.ripe.net/projects/ris/index.html
>
>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 
> Rene Wilhelm                           RIPE Network Coordination Centre
> Email: wilhelm at ripe.net                Amsterdam, the Netherlands
> Phone: +31 20 535 4417                 Fax: +31 20 535 4445
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-