[sdnog] Can not get the real ASNs using traceroute -a

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 24 Sep 2020, at 15:24, Nishal Goburdhan wrote:
> On 24 Sep 2020, at 13:06, Patrick Okui wrote:
>
>> I haven’t dug into details to figure out why that character from 
>> vodacom registered that object or why but that’s how the ASNs got 
>> into traceroute.
> that’s a good question.  initially, i thought this might have been 
> allocated to vodacom/one of their clients, but some whois digging 
> shows otherwise.
> for those of you that did not know, you can get a “history” from 
> objects in the whois database like this:
> #  whois -h whois.afrinic.net 197.254.224.0/19  --list-versions
[snip]
> so this was always a canar prefix.  and vodacom had no reason to 
> register those objects imho.
> anyway, more homework for the canar team..!

so, this question - for the same network prefix - came up again last 
week in a conversation.  because it was still a problem, i asked the 
vodacom network team to please remove the old (and incorrect) object and 
they did with no hesitation.
sara, you should find that your “traceroute -a” will start to show 
the correct ASN in the next 2-3 days.  although the incorrect IRR object 
is removed, there will likely still be caches of all sorts that may need 
to be cleared out.

however, now there is just one IRR object for this prefix 
(197.254.224.0/19).  and, that IRR object is not being maintained by 
canar, the users of that address space.  imagine if the team at EMIX 
decided to do a cleanup and removed objects that they were not supposed 
to have registered.  if this object was removed responsible IP transit 
providers and internet exchange points would filter (block) this prefix 
from being accepted via BGP.  internet users using this address space, 
would suddenly find themselves unable to see large/use portions of the 
internet.

team canar, if you are listening (and you *should* be), this is probably 
not what you want to happen.  so, you would do yourselves a future 
favour, to start the process of checking that:
# you have all your necessary IRR objects registered
# you are the maintainer for these
# you are not dependent on some external party for the registration 
service.

hint:  afrinic makes it really easy for you to do this yourself, these 
days!

—n.