[DBWG] All AFRINIC-administered IP space

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

OK, so I worked on this problem some more since I last posted, and
I made quite a lot of progress on my own.  (If fact it may seem a
bit miraculous what I;ve been able to accomplish in a short period
of time, but it isn't.  I already had a lot of the code that I needed
already written and debugged.  I just had to understand better how
to get the data I needed and then I just had to munge that data a
lot with software tools I had already written.)

Here is what I believe to be a good & complete summary of all of the
IPv4 address blocks (expressed as IPv4 CIDRs) that under AFRINIC's
administration... all 579 of them (fully aggregated):

https://pastebin.com/raw/xJARMhT7

I understand that 579 different IPv4 CIDRs may seem like a lot, but
everyone should realize that over time, there have been a lot of
transfers of blocks into the AFRINIC region, and also, even back when
AFRINIC was formed, a lot of blocks that quite properly got transfered
into the AFRINIC region at that time (because they were assigned to
African entities) were sort-of interspersed and mixed in with other
blocks that rightly needed to stay in order regions.

Anyway, the list linked to above was derived by simply pulling all of
the IPv4 address block records out of the daily AFRINIC stats file:

ftp://ftp.afrinic.net/stats/afrinic/delegated-afrinic-extended-latest

Unfortunately, for historical reasons, those records specific a base
address and then the length of the block (in IP addresses).  So I had
to convert those start/length things to IPv4 CIDRs... but I already
had a tool to do that.  Then finally, I also applied an "aggregator"
tool that I have so that adjacent CIDRs of the same size would get
aggregated together into one block.

(Ultimately, I plan of doing all of this same stuff also for IPv6
and for ASNs.  But that may be a ways off yet.)

I also already had a tool which summarizes route objects (taken from
any IRR) and which writes these summaries one-per-line.  I had
altready run that over the entire (downloaded) RADB.  I had also
already used those summaries to create a (summarized) list of RADB
route objects that were *not* associated with any IPv4 blocks that
had been assigned by any RIR to any resource member.  The result was
a master list of -all- current RADB bogon route objects which make
reference to bogon IPv4 address space.

So anyway, given that list (of RADB IPv4 address space bogon route objects)
and given the fully aggregated list of IPv4 address blocks that are under
AFRINIC management, it was then as easy task to apply John Levine's enhanced
version of a tool called "grepcidr" to fish out *just* those RADB IPv4 bogon
(address space) route objects that relate to unassigned AFRINIC IPv4 space.

It turns out, there are a lot of them... 1,248 to be precise:

https://pastebin.com/raw/vFKxMsBc

Note that many of these RADB route objects refer not just to bogon IPv4
address space, but also, some of them specify an origin: for the route
which is itself currently an unassigned "bogon" ASN.  (So effectively,
some of these are doubly bogus.)

I personally am not going to do anything more about these bogon RADB route
objects for now, because like I said, the people at RADB don't seem to
like me and they sure as hell don't listen to me.  But If someone else
wants to approach them, or ask hostmaster(at)afrinic.net to approach
them about cleaning out all of this garbage, then by all means, please
be my guest.

(In an ideal universe, AFRINIC management and staff would view all of
their currently unassigned IPv4 space as "assets" whose value may be
somewhat diminished if current or future squatters have RADB route objects
in place that cover some or all of the unassigned blocks, and thus they
would have some incentive to ask RADB to clean all of this crap up.
I frankly don't know if AFRINIC management and/or staff would take this
view right now.  They have a lot else on their plates at the moment.)


Regards,
rfg


P.s.  Total amount of AFRINIC-administered IPv4 addresses covered by the
RADB bogon IPv4 route objects linked to above: 1,757,440