ACSP Suggestion 2024.8: Increase Length Limit on IRR Remarks Field
Suggestion
Author: Dale Carder
Submitted On: 09 May 2024
Description: Increase IRR “Remarks:” field length limit, and/or allow multiple “Remarks:” fields
Value to Community:
When we were trying to migrate our AS-SET records from a 3rd party non-authoritative registry to the ARIN IRR, we found there appears to be a length limit of 1024 on the remarks field.
Our motivating use case for this is primarily that Lumen (Level3) AS3356’s filtergen system can not do cross-registry lookups, so they implement a proprietary “Remarks: Level3 members:” syntax to explicitly enable specification of member objects prefixed with the registry they are located in. This field then overrides the standard RPSL “members:” field in an AS-SET.
As the majority of our downstream customers are in 3rd party non-authoritative registries and that we want to facilitate them moving their data to authoritative registries, particularly the ARIN IRR, this means that we end up with a fairly large set of remarks we need to include as well as duplicates for any ASN that may records in multiple databases.
It would be straightforward to maintain this amount of data in one object as we previously did on the other IRR server that supported multiple remarks fields. At present, we have had to chain together multiple AS-SET records to overcome this length limitation in ARIN’s IRR.
Additionally, it is often seen that networks document other items such as routing policies, supported bgp communities, and other items relevant to BGP peering in the remarks field. These also are often found to exceed 1024 characters. As we want to facilitate networks migrating to authoritative IRR servers, the ARIN community may increasingly need feature parity.
Timeframe: Not specified
Status: Open Updated: 03 June 2024
Tracking Information
ARIN Comment
3 June 2024
Thank you for your suggestion, numbered 2024.8 upon confirmed receipt, asking that we increase the length limit on the IRR remarks field.
We agree that this would be a useful improvement that would assist in the transition to ARIN’s authenticated IRR from another third-party IRR. ARIN will consider your suggestion in conjunction with other IRR improvements that are in our development pipeline. Your suggestion will remain open until a decision is made on when the features you have requested can be developed. Thank you for participating in the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process.
Regards,
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)