Re: incorporation state of ARIN's asn.txt

["Peter Müller" <peter.mueller@ipfire.org>]

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Hi nusenu,

thank you for reaching out.

> I did read the recent threads on this mailing list about "Import (technical) AS names from ARIN",
> which I assume should improve or entirely solve the situation.

Yes, this more or less addresses the issue of AS names missing completely for ARIN space.

Given the fact that I have no idea on what to do with LACNIC, and the AS names file provided by ARIN
does not contain human-readable AS names (although DigitalOcean is one of the better examples in there),
I rather see it as an improvement than a solution. :-)

It would be interesting to learn where MaxMind got these data from, as well as more precise location
information for ARIN and LACNIC space. Apart from scraping (PITA deluxe) and/or some contract-based
stuff, I have no clue...

If you or anybody else has any idea of getting more precise location or AS data for space maintained
by these two RIRs in a reliable way, we will be most interested in hearing about it.

> Is my understanding correct that your recent work [1] on adding ARIN's AS name [2] data has been merged?

Yes, you are correct, that patch has been merged. It can be retrieved here:
https://git.ipfire.org/?p=location/libloc.git;a=commit;h=92403f3910c7a1aa576fc56953ec931ebfffd107

The reason why you do not see those AS names in production is because there is no new libloc release,
yet. There is one bug (#12553) left to fix, but afterwards, I guess we are fine to release libloc 0.9.7;
a day later, the generated database dump should contain the AS information.

> Should I already see ARINs asn.txt AS name information or will this be "visible" in ipfire's db in the near future?

No and yes. :-)

For the sake of completeness, I take the liberty to note that the database.txt file you are referring
to, and the Tor maintainers retrieve for baking it into their releases is _not_ the actual location
database. So, technically, Tor is using the data conglomerated together by libloc - which we are happy
about -, but not libloc itself. As far as I am aware, they decided against shipping libloc with Tor
for the moment, primarily due to compatibility issues with the 0.3.5.x LTS branch.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller