On 6 Oct 2020, at 18:28, Job Snijders via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:

Dear DB-WG,

Some colleagues are working to address the never-ending-story of 'where
the heck are IPs geographically?'. This problem space has been brought
up numerous times in the Database Working Group, but we never managed to
solve it. As with all compsci problems adding a layer of indirection can
help ;-)

This current draft suggests overloading the RPSL 'remarks:' field with a
structured attribute value, however I suspect we would do ourselves a
disservice to overload a 'remarks:' field.

Instead it would be better to add a 'geofeed:' attribute to the RPSL
inetnum/inetnum6 class dictionary, which as value contains a URL with
http or https scheme.

The draft: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ymbk-opsawg-finding-geofeeds

The value of the attribute could be validated using something like
"org.apache.commons.validator.UrlValidator", the attribute would look
like this, only valid in the inetnum/inet6num:

   "geofeed:   [optional]   [single]     [ ]"

Example object:

   inetnum:        192.0.2.0 - 192.0.2.255
   netname:        EXAMPLE
   country:        NL
   geofeed:        https://example.com/geofeed.csv
   ... snip ...
   source:         RIPE

What do others think?

Yes I find this much more reasonable instead of overloading the remarks field. By default the remarks are being ignored by the parsers as it doesn’t contain any usable information that can be used in the router config generation (or other type of config). They contain information for the operator/human that reads the file on his screen.

By enriching the RPSL dictionary and having a “geofeed” RPSL attribute (which by the way should not be mandatory) will be easier for someone to extend his parser to use that field without overloading the parser with many “if” and regex expressions. Plus the upcoming RFC specifies that "The format MUST be as in this example,“ so a verification needs to be applied later on.

Of course it’s weird to talk about enriching RPSL on 2020 but putting this apart, I believe it’s more correct to implement it in this way.

Kind regards,

Job

ps. In IRRd v4.2 support for the 'geofeed:' attribute will be added
https://github.com/irrdnet/irrd/issues/396