[dbwg] ReferralServer and ASNs

[Dave Diller]

william at elan.net wrote:
>   I've noticed that since introduction of ReferralServer as atribute of 
> the ORG, number of ASNs also return ReferralServer as part of the output, 
> for example:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> [william at sokol william]$ whois 16631 at whois.arin.net

No, we definitely don't have anything implementable for ASN info here, and 
you're right, I doubt the schema exists currently. ASNs aren't hierarchical 
like IP blocks so there would be no point to a referral type system.

I suspect that, since the tag is attached to the ORG itself, that it displays 
as part of the 'standard dump' that whois returns when a query is run.  IE ask 
for info on a bit of data and it pulls the ORG info followed by the specifics 
of the query.  ReferralServer is simply included as part of the normal "return 
this when asked about something belonging to a particular ORG".  Most likely 
*ANY* ORG with a ReferralServer will return it when the ASN is queried.

>   I'm thinking its not exactly a bad idea to allow ISPs to display information
> about its ASN and its routing policies (i.e. like route server entry but 
> on the ISP side, rather then directly at radb), but I have reservations 
> about if rwhois can be used for this (and we do have standard RPSL for 
> such routing database and in fact several large ISPs do have their own 
> routedb servers). 

Even if some "routing policy" features were implemented in rwhois, I seriously 
doubt we'd ever use them.  There are enough other implementations out there 
that are more or less complete that I don't see the need to try and incorporate 
it into RWHOIS.  Neat idea, lot of work, and no real benefit since the 
functionality already exists in numerous places.

 > What do others think should be done in regards to ReferralServer and ASN?

I don't know what's involved backend in filtering out which fields to send in 
response to a particular type of query (block vs ASN) but I'm not really 
bothered by it being there, personally.  My ORG uses RWHOIS so that flag might 
as well show up as often as possible upon a query :-)

-dd