Overview of the IRR

Introduction

The Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a distributed routing database development effort. Data from the Internet Routing Registry may be used by anyone worldwide to help debug, configure, and engineer Internet routing and addressing. The IRR provides a mechanism for validating the contents of BGP announcement messages or mapping an origin AS number to a list of networks.

The IRR emerged early in 1995, a time when providers worldwide were preparing for the end of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the birth of the commercial Internet. A current list of databases in the IRR can be found here.

Obtaining IRR Data

Routing data from the entire global registry may be obtained by entering 'whois' commands such as:

	  whois -h whois.radb.net <network_IP>
	  whois -h whois.radb.net AS<Autonomous_System_Number>

You can also obtain IRR data through FTP from ftp://ftp.radb.net/radb/dbase or access it indirectly through the use of free user tools.

IRRToolSet

The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (ISI) has developed a set of freely available software tools that allows ISPs to generate router configurations directly off information in the Internet Routing Registry. The toolset includes a policy evaluator and router configuration generator as well as CIDR Advisor, a tool that evaluates the aggregation ranges associated with a routing domain, in order to minimize routing table size.

The IRRToolSet is now available from ISC at the IRRToolSet project page.