Grant Report: Open Source RegCtl and PrefixCtl
2023 ARIN Community Grant Program Recipient Report
FullCtl received an ARIN Community Grant in 2023 to support its work to provide standardized, reliable, and contextualized Registry Data Access Protocol (RDAP) and Route Origin Authorization (ROA) information management, globally. The project’s goal was to complete development of “RegCtl,” a software tool to normalize registration data to a global standard, and to combine this with a completed “PrefixCtl” tool that can track IP resources over time and add additional context from Whois, the Internet Routing Registry (IRR), and routing data.
Registration data is not standardized; each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) has its own data schema. Additionally, changes made at RIRs have downstream effects, with no “buffer” to absorb these changes. ROA data can also be affected. Further, queries of registration data fail without context, and this happens often because of the “no less, no more” philosophy to answering queries. This project aimed to solve all of this (and more) with fully open-source RegCtl and PrefixCtl tools.
Learn more about all the 2023 ARIN Community Grant Program Recipients.
Outcome and Impact of the Project
As reported at the ARIN 53 Public Policy and Members Meeting, we successfully completed development and open-source publication of PrefixCtl in early 2024 — a prerequisite for the RegCtl work. Details on that can be found on the FullCtl blog and in the ARIN 53 meeting transcript and webcast recording.
Since that time, we were able to complete development and open-source publication of RegCtl, and both PrefixCtl and RegCtl code are available on GitHub for community use.
What’s Next?
The FullCtl team is already using RegCtl every day for finding consistent RDAP information, and now it’s time to alert the rest of the world to the availability of this tool.
We are excited to announce the launch of a permanent instance of RegCtl, now available at https://reg.fullctl.io*. Comprehensive documentation for RegCtl can be found at https://reg.fullctl.io/docs, and an example Autonomous System (AS) query is available at https://reg.fullctl.io/autnum/63311.
For those interested in exploring PrefixCtl, a demo is available with the creation of a free FullCtl account.
Due to costs, we have not yet been able to create a graphical user interface (GUI) for the tool. For now, users must enter queries in the URL and view the raw results returned, but we hope to build a GUI and add this to our website and/or ARIN’s website as a community tool in the future. We also intend to add RegCtl functionality into PrefixCtl in our own production instances.
About the ARIN Community Grant Program
ARIN provides financial grants in support of initiatives that improve the overall Internet industry and Internet user environment. Are you working on a project that advances ARIN’s mission and broadly benefits the Internet community within the ARIN region through informational outreach, research, Internet technical improvements, or Registry processes and technology improvements? Visit the ARIN Community Grant Program page for more information and to find out how your organization can apply in 2025. For application tips and support, read this post on our blog.
*This link will take you to the default page for no query, which results in a {“detail”:“Not Found”} message since no object has been searched for.
Any views, positions, statements, or opinions of a guest blog post are those of the author alone and do not represent those of ARIN. ARIN does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or validity of any claims or statements, nor shall ARIN be liable for any representations, omissions, or errors contained in a guest blog post.
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