There is a fairly old action on Eric-Jan and me to circulate a proposal on extending the definition for the RIPE Database router object inet-rtr: The original definition is documented in ripe-122. The background for the proposed extension is the discussion about documenting the routing of "overlay" networks, most prominently the Mbone. Quite a while ago Erik-Jan Bos circulated a proposal to extend inet-rtr: with an mpeer: attribute. This proposed mpeer: attribute is/was intended to specifically document Mbone DVMRP tunnels. [ I'm going to re-distribute this paper in a separate message for those of you who don't have a copy readily available ] Further discussion revealed that by rearranging and extending the definition of the *existing* peer: attribute there is a possibility to make the concept even more general and potentially covering IP over IP, STUN, whatever. At the same time we could avoid inventing just another attribute. The current use of the attribute is: peer: <Peer address> <Peer AS> <Routing Protocol> [localAS ASnumber] The generalisation would involve changing that definition to peer: <Peer address> <Peer protocol> <peer-proto-specific info> So for the good old BGP peering this might then look like: peer: 192.87.4.6 BGP4 AS2122 localAS AS2121 for an Mbone tunnel this might be peer: 192.87.4.6 DVMRP metric thresh and for an IP-over-IP even peer: 192.87.4.6 IP Unfortunately this approach would require a non-compatible change to the existing peer: attribute. How many tools would be affected? What's the expected effort to fix these tools? Your opinions and input wrt to the concept and the proposal to change the peer: definiton for BGP peerings is appreciated - before we spend too much effort on the details.... Regards Wilfried -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wilfried Woeber : e-mail: Woeber@CC.UniVie.ac.at Computer Center - ACOnet : Vienna University : Tel: +43 1 4065822 355 Universitaetsstrasse 7 : Fax: +43 1 4065822 170 A-1010 Vienna, Austria, Europe : NIC: WW144 --------------------------------------------------------------------------