Daniel,
bmanning@ISI.EDU writes:
There is certainly a need for planning and/or simulation tools which support the designer in handling topologies too complex to keep in (one) mind. Anyone working on such things?
I have been led to believe that the RA has this as an item on its adgenda.
Still the question remains: Anyone working on such things?
Sorry to be flippant (just this one time :-).
Seriously: I would like to know about any developments in this area. We should prevent wheel re-invention.
You're quite right; thanks for raising this. The RA staff is currently concentrating on writing tools to generate router configuration files from RIPE-181 policy and route descriptions. The first of these tools will be in active production usage within a few weeks. We have several beta-test sites, but I would be interested in talking to anyone else who has an interest in these tools. As part of this tool development, the RA project has written the following: - A RIPE-181 information server (in Perl-5) which returns information in a form that is handy for policy analysis and router configuration generation. - A RIPE-181 policy parser (in C++ and bison) which converts policy expressions to any of several forms, including parse trees or net lists. - An early "View Analysis" program (in Perl-4), which compares and processes RIPE-181 policy descriptions for inclusion in a Route Server. - Dumps of most of the data which is in the PRDB into RIPE-181 format (available via whois -h rrdb.merit.edu). Our hope is that these pieces can form a platform for a large range of analysis tools in the future. AS-topology "tree walkers", for instance, should be fairly easy to write based on the output of the parser. All this code and the tools built from it will be publicly and freely available, (though copyrighted). The RA staff has talked some about further analysis tools, but we're pretty busy rolling out the Config Generators and updating the Routing Registry to use RIPE-181 at the moment, including picking up the great new code release from RIPE! We, too, would like to share development and avoid duplication of effort in the production of new tools. --Dale