The problem with routing registries
Anyone who has followed me or I have done IP work for knows I am a fan of Internet Routing Registries (IRR). However, there is a glaring issue with these registries. I will use the example I ran into today.
A downstream client of a WISP client bought 67.158.57.0/24 off the open market about a year ago. They finally have things in place where they are looking to announce this IP space to the world. I helped them set up BGP to my client ISP and sent out the normal LOAs to the upstream providers. I received this back from Hurricane Electric.
The IRR entry for this prefix does not list 14333. https://www.radb.net/query?keywords=67.158.57.0%2F24 Please update IRR and let me know. I can add this to your prefix filter.
And a Subsequent followup message
I can add this prefix to your filter, based on the LOA. However the reason we require IRR entries for prefixes is because our peers only accept our re-announcements if there are correct IRR entries authorizing the announcement. Can you confirm what the source ASN will be for this announcement? If a customer of yours is going to re-announce this to you, and that ASN is listed on: https://www.radb.net/query?keywords=67.158.57.0%2F24 Then this will work. However if you plan to announce this sourced from your ASN 14333, this will not be picked up past our network.
This highlights one of the glaring issues with registries. There are no checks and balances when it comes to stale data in registries. The same is true with access lists in provider routers.
What I am guessing happened is when the /20 block was carved up and sold it’s information was never removed from the routing registry. Since this is RADb and it does not talk directly with ARIN we have some inconsistencies going on.
The following RFC illustrates many of the issues folks run into.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7682
From the summary of the document
As discussed above, many of the problems that have traditionally stifled IRR deployment have, themselves, become historical. However, there are still real operational considerations that limit IRR usage from realizing its full effectiveness.
To further complicate this Hurricane Electric is referencing data in RADb, which is a paid registry.
So what are am I going to have to do? In order to make this right, I will have to reach out to RADB and have them edit the registry to start with. Since this customer, nor the ISP, are members of RADb it will take time.
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