Hi Erik, I didn't follow any of the discussions on the new MRT format, as I (naively) thought it would just be minor update for the longer AS numbers. But after reading your recent mails and having started work on importing RIS raw in a SG project, I see there's a fundamental change (at least for RIB dumps): in the old format, a call to bgpdump_read_next would return information on one and only one entry of the routing table. In the new format, a call to bgpdump_read_next returns a whole block of entries; for the latest rrc03 bview, anything between 1 and 35 at a time. To me it looks strange, seems to make programmer's life needlessly more complicated. Now one not only has to loop over all bgpdump_read_next records, but also loop over all entries in each "record". Programs which worked with old raw data will need major revision; and those which need to work with both old and new format will look ugly, a different paradigm for processing old and new data. Do you have any idea of the reasons behind this big change? Cheers, -- Rene
Dear Colleagues,
This is an update concerning 4-byte Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs).
An IETF draft has been released describing a new version of the MRT format, used for RIS raw data. We have published a new version of libbgpdump to support this, which can be downloaded from: http://www.ris.ripe.net/source/
There is at this stage no set date on which 4-byte ASNs will appear in the RIS. The current raw data does not use the new format.
Details of the changes to RIS for 4-byte ASNs, including more information on the new raw data format, can be found at: http://www.ripe.net/projects/ris/docs/asn.html
If you have any questions, please send an e-mail to <ris@ripe.net>.
Regards,
Erik Romijn Information Services Department RIPE NCC