[ppml] What's with CRISP/IRIS? ( was Re: OT: What's with rwhois? )

[Andrew Newton]

On Aug 16, 2005, at 5:32 PM, Matt Pounsett wrote:

> There's the work on CRISP/IRIS of course, but I'm not sure I see  
> that work producing something that can be widely implemented for a  
> while yet.. maybe I'm wrong on that, and I'm certainly willing to  
> have my understanding of the state of that work corrected, if  
> that's the case.

Matt,

Here's an update of what is going on in this space.

 From the standardization point of view:

- the AREG draft went through a number of revisions and finally  
passed working group last call at revision -12.  It is in the hands  
of the IESG now.

- two transfer protocols have been in the works to replace BEEP.   
These are LWZ (UDP) and XPC (TCP).  Both should be much, much easier  
to implement than BEEP.

Of course, drafts and RFCs are not much use by themselves, so from  
the implementation point of view:

- At RIPE 48 last year, I demoed IRISServ and Pimmit (a client)  
running AREG -06.  I've been waiting for the AREG spec to settle down  
before updating them to the latest.  I have been intending to demo  
this software at a NANOG meeting, but the timing never seems to work  
out.

- At this past IETF, I had discussions with the RIPE NCC engineers  
regarding re-use of either IRISServ or Flowerbed (both are servers,  
they just have different architectures) for their systems.  Their  
long-term strategy is to build something complete from the ground up,  
but they wanted something they could use in the near-term as a  
prototype.

- Also at this past IETF, I spent a couple of hours with the LACNIC  
engineers doing some interoperability testing.  I just spent the last  
week putting my code in a more useable state to further that work.

Regarding the main thrust of your message about back-ends and formats  
and so forth, I understand your concern about the time-investment to  
get a small server up and running.  That was the motivation for the  
creation of Flowerbed (as it turns out, IRISServ with HSQLDB is just  
as easy).  I'm not really sure that focusing on the back-end  
technology is all that important, as it seems the data entry is far  
more of problem.  Doing hand-entry of data in SQL, XML, or whatever  
has got to be grueling and time consuming.  I've been thinking about  
a simple wizard like application to generate the XML, but I just  
haven't had time to explore it yet.

-andy