4 July 2018 - This is to inform you that the RIPE NCC will be making some changes to their Internet Routing Registry (IRR) which may affect AFRINIC resource holders effective September 2018. Exact timelines are yet to be determined and announced.
Prior to 2012, when the AFRINIC IRR was established, a large section of AFRINIC resource holders was using the RIPE NCC IRR to maintain their route objects. Even today, many AFRINIC members continue to use the RIPE NCC IRR.
The RIPE NCC was recently instructed by its community to make changes to the way out-of-region objects are handled in its IRR database. In short, the RIPE NCC IRR will soon no longer support the creation of route(6) and aut-num objects that refer to out-of-region resources (resources that are not allocated to the RIPE region by IANA). Details are in the documents linked at the end of this message.
It is crucial that AFRINIC resource members who currently use the RIPE NCC IRR understand these changes and are aware of their impact:
- It will no longer be possible to create new "out-of-region" route(6) objects and "out-of-region" ASN in the RIPE NCC IRR. AFRINIC members with prefixes from AFRINIC will not be able to use the RIPE NCC IRR to create new route(6) objects.
- The existing "out-of-region" objects will be retained in the RIPE NCC IRR, for the foreseeable future. There are no current plans to delete the objects. It will still be possible to maintain (edit) the objects.
- The "source:" attribute of "out of region" objects will be changed to "RIPE-NONAUTH" instead of "RIPE". This may affect operators who use the "source" attribute as part of their filtering when processing IRR objects and those who perform whois queries with the source flag (-s or --sources). If they only specify "RIPE", then no out-of-region objects will be returned. If no source flag is specified, then matches from both RIPE and RIPE-NONAUTH are returned.
- The creation of new ROUTE(6) objects in the RIPE NCC IRR will no longer need authorisation from the ASN holder in the RIPE NCC database, but will need authorisation from the IPv4 or IPv6 address holder.
We encourage AFRINIC members to migrate any route(6) objects to the AFRINIC Routing Registry without delay. The AFRINIC IRR is a free service
for AFRINIC members, and it supports very similar features to the RIPE NCC IRR.
Migration to the AFRINIC IRR should be easy for members who have an AFRINIC-issued ASN and AFRINIC-issued IP addresses.
However, resource holders who have a non-AFRINIC ASN will require staff intervention for every route(6) object that they create. We recognise that this is not scalable, and we have created a focus group of AFRINIC staff, working in close collaboration with the RIPE NCC, to design a long-term solution to this issue.
AFRINIC will keep you posted with further updates.
More information on the AFRINIC Routing Registry athttps://www.afrinic.net/en/services/afrinic-irr.
For help with the routing registry, send email toirr@afrinic.net.
More information on the current discussions relating to the AFRINIC IRR can be found on AFRINIC's database working group (DBWG) mailing list; subscribe or view the archives athttps://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/dbwg. Please join this mailing list if you want to stay updated and share your migration experience.
You can find a full list of planned actions from the RIPE NCC here:https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/db-wg/2018-February/005825.html
The RIPE NCC recently published an article on RIPE Labs with some background and additional context:https://labs.ripe.net/Members/denis/out-of-region-route-6-and-aut-num-objects-in-the-ripe-database