[rpd] Last Call - RPKI ROAs for Unallocated and Unassigned AFRINIC Address Space AFPUB-2019-GEN-006-DRAFT03.

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 27 Jul 2021, at 6:30, Owen DeLong wrote:

>

> I am neither an arm chair juror nor judge. I will state that an actual 

> judge (in fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Mauritius) 

> issued an order asking AFRINIC to immediately correct the WHOIS 

> entries and restore Cloud Innovation’s membership on July 13th. 

> Clearly he felt that CI’s claims of harm and the merits of the case 

> were sufficient to grant such relief.


oh dear.  i’ve asked many times to stop referring to non-RPD related 
issues.  what you might think that the court did ask is simply a matter 
of your interpretation bounded by your education and interpretation of 
the text.  *my* education and interpretation says otherwise;  if i 
wanted to argue semantics with you (and this part is not relevant to RPD 
so i apologise in advance:

</off-topic>
.. i would say that the order that i read here [1] says: “do not act 
on the board’s resolution until you appear in court on $date”.  what 
i also see is that (as the transcript shows) this order-to-not-act 
arrived on july13, when action was made on july8.  specifically, i 
don’t see the the words (quoting you) “immediate” nor do i see 
“correct” nor do i see “restore” in the text of the order.  just 
a “cease and desist”;  which, i believe is what afrinic did do (ie. 
stopped changing WHOIS entries at that point) until such time as a court 
appearance was made.

i am guessing that during the “exchange of views” these words were 
possibly mentioned;  likely others too, like “reinstate”, which 
would have been another important word, imho, that should have been in 
the original order.  what’s clear to me, reading the transcript of 
court on page 4, are the words : “will fully comply with the Order”, 
and as we know the WHOIS entries were corrected, so can we *please* stop 
this bleating about how afrinic didn’t listen to the court order.  
because, that’s not how we all view this, and, it’s clear (at least 
to me) that the court saw reasonable doubt in their original order as 
well, else they would/should have immediately held afrinic in contempt 
of court for not listening to the july13 order.  they did not.
</topic>

i’m sorry for going off-topic.  before you reply :-)  and for the 
record, i don’t pretend that *my* interpretation is correct.  but 
merely that the order was easy to misinterpret, and that this is not 
this place to discuss your (or my) interpretation.  can we move back to 
resource policy now, and you can move the rest of your legal discussions 
to the everyone-say-what-they-want list.  please.



> Upon the announcement, several providers proactively reached out to CI 

> clients and told them that in light of the AFRINIC announcement, they 

> felt that their LOAs for the space were no longer valid and that they 

> were beginning termination procedures. I don’t know whether this was 

> a passive response to the announcement by AFRINIC or whether AFRINIC 

> reached out to upstreams to further undermine CI’s client base. 

> Clearly, AFRINIC

>> here’s a short list of things that i would look for (and which are 

>> relevant to discuss here):

>> # were existing IRR objects removed/replaced?

> I’m not sure.

>> # were new contradictory IRR objects introduced?

> I honestly don’t know.

>> # were existing ROAs revoked/replaced/removed?

> Clients were notified of pending termination based on invalidation of 

> their LOAs. I do not know if any clients were actually disconnected, 

> but needless to say it created quite a bit of unnecessary fear and 

> concern among CI clients, providers, etc.


“notified of pending termination” is not the same as “ multiple 
providers started rejecting LOAs as invalid and disconnecting 
customers.“.  again, this is likely *my* third world public school 
english failing me, but i read “disconnecting customers” as remove 
of service, and not,  *intent* to remove service in 90d.

fwiw, using a random block, i found this to indicate what would have 
been changed in whois:
whois -h whois.afrinic.net --show-version 3 156.224.0.0/24

(writing as an ex-netop that worked at a transit provider) personally, i 
don’t see that as sufficient to disconnect a paying client 
immediately, although i admit this is something that i would flag to 
revisit in 90d.  what’s important to me - and likely other operators 
here - is that no ROAs/IRR objects were removed.  in operator terms i 
would read that as “no packets were harmed” and frankly, that’s a 
primary concern that came through from the discussions, and one that 
many of us asked to see documented properly:
# what’s afrinic’s policy for resource retrieval  (which was since 
posted), and
# how can we make sure no legitimate packets are harmed

(and that extends beyond the policy under discussion)



>> afrinic said neither of these were touched.  are you saying they 

>> lied?

>> (i admit, i don’t actually know and i would be genuinely horrified 

>> if this were the case)

>

> I am only stating that WHOIS changes resulted in actual problems for 

> CI clients. I have not made any statements about IRR objects as I 

> simply don’t know.


thank you for being clear and unambiguous.  let’s agree that afrinic 
changed a descriptor in whois, but did not delete nor remove IRR entries 
(also whois) nor ROAs.  and since those of us (including yourself) who 
have operated networks know what we look for from the RIR, this is an 
important validation that at least the retrieval process that was posted 
earlier, is in effect accurately.  i repeat my earlier challenge;  how 
do we make this better (see follow up mail).



> Uh, no, it’s not. They have repeatedly violated their own rules and 

> gotten away with it. Most of the time, nobody objects and most of the 

> time, the violations are minor. Nonetheless, there are numerous 

> historical violations not covered by current litigation. Look at the 

> procedures and irregularities around virtually every election in the 

> last 5 years, for example.


i welcome your evidence on a non-resource policy discussion list.  
alternatively, i am not familiar enough with mauritian law to point you 
to the appropriate legal process to follow, for the claims you suggest 
above.  there are others listening here, that may be able to assist 
better.

-n.


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