On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Henk Uijterwaal wrote:
That's one thing, but what I think the RIPE community (operators) would really like is for the RIS service to be expanded with tools we consider best, as was done with BGPlay. Operators don't have time to investigate the work done by researchers in various universities, they need hands on tools working on the full set of RIS data.
In principle I agree, but I do see two problems here:
* We're not operators, so it will be hard for us to judge if a tool is valuable or not. And I certainly don't want to label tools as "not useful".
* If we support a tool, then we should be fairly certain that it will exist for a while. I.e. it is not a student's project where the student has gone on, that suddenly disappears or is not supported. For BGPlay we did check that the Rome group would continue to develop it.
So, I think we should be neutral here and just list what is available.
Of course, listing the tools on the RIS website is good, as it might help raise awareness. And not every conceivable tool would be in scope for RIS to support directly. But with a "user" hat on, I'd say RIS could use something which gives summarized/aggregate information. We have so many peers on more than a dozen RRCs that users easily can get lost. Unless you are looking for something specific, it can be hard to mine all the available data. I see your point regarding continued support, so maybe RIPE NCC should take inspiration from the work done in the research community (e.g. BGPinspect) and use that in expanding the available tools for looking at RIS data. Another idea might be to run some sort of survey of our own, how people use RIS, what they'd like to see added, worked on. Post it to routing-wg@ripe.net to reach all in the RIPE community (most of nanog just seem to default to routeviews) -- Rene