Tech News – Stay on track with IRR explorer

At IAA, we’re always looking for ways to improve our service and provide the best possible experience for our Members. An important tool in our arsenal is IRR explorer.
IRR explorer shows the routing, Internet Routing Registry (IRR) registrations and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) status for resources and highlights potential issues. IRR explorer is a powerful troubleshooting tool that helps to manage and verify routing information contained in various IRR databases via IAA’s internal IRR mirror, so we’re even more efficient at running our networks. IRR explorer helps to catch any errors so that routing information is optimised.  With IRR explore, our Members have a near real-time tool to verify that their own IRR data, RPK and ROAs are accurate.

Here are some of the many use cases for IRR explorer:

Improving routability of prefixes. IRR explorer can point out discrepancies between routing registry data, ROAs, and routing table entries, and make suggestions on how to fix them.

Doing housekeeping on routing registry entries. By offering a clear overview of entries in many routing registries (and showing the relevant WHOIS information) we have an easy way of finding those old database entries we forgot about.

Analysing routing issues. Because IRR explorer combines data from multiple IRR databases, it can serve as a good starting point for analysing some types of routing issues. For example, IRR explorer enables users to easily visualise RPKI-invalid route advertisements that might be being propagated by a transit provider that doesn’t perform RPKI verification, but rather relies on (potentially invalid) route objects to generate their ACLs.

Monitoring your prefixes. IRR explorer can provide the data in nicely rendered tables, but also in raw JSON format. Below the tables there’s a ‘source data as JSON’ link. For example, this link to IRR explorer shows the JSON data for the 1.1.1.0/24 prefix we checked as in a previous example. This allows for programmatic integration of IRR data into monitoring tools.

Incredibly, IRR explorer is open source, with development and maintenance by the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund and the Internet Society (ISOC), who – like us – are dedicated to supporting the Internet industry for a better future. It’s just one of the many tools we use every day to bring you the efficient network our Members have come to depend upon.