During APRICOT 2019, the APNIC Secretariat discussed its ongoing data reconciliation efforts. As part of that work, historical delegation and transfer information from the Korea Network Information Center (KRNIC) has now been incorporated into APNIC’s address registry. This has led to a large number of changes in APNIC’s registry publications, including the Extended Delegated Stats Report and the Transfer Log.
The APNIC Secretariat will be carrying out similar reconciliation work with the other NIRs in the near future and as an ongoing activity.
Background
Up until 2004, NIRs received large blocks of IPv4 addresses from APNIC for sub-delegation to their members, under what was referred to as the confederation model. Since 2004, however, all delegations made by both the APNIC Secretariat itself and the NIRs have been from the same IPv4 pool. This is called ‘direct’ allocation and assignment since it no longer makes use of ‘indirect’ delegations from an NIR-managed block, but happens directly from the APNIC registry. The practice helps to reduce overhead for NIRs, as they no longer need to request or manage large blocks of addresses. It also promotes better ‘aggregation’ and effective use of the IPv4 pool. However, for those NIRs that previously operated under the confederation model, a legacy of blocks with sub-delegations remains.
Current work
The APNIC Secretariat and KRNIC have recently completed some consistency checks on the status of resources held by KRNIC under the confederation model, and this has resulted in greater clarity in the disposition of these resources. As a result, we have updated APNIC’s address registry to reflect three kinds of change:
- Correction of the date of allocation/assignment for a resource
- Correction of the identity of the holder of a resource
- Addition of a transfer, whether a market transfer or a merger/acquisition
These changes to our address registry have, in turn, led to updates to our registry publications, including the Extended Delegated Stats Report and the Transfer Log (mentioned earlier), among others. In some cases, the date of a transaction has changed, and in others, the unique organization identity code for a resource has changed. As a result of having this finer-grained detail about the confederation blocks, some resources that were previously treated as belonging to KRNIC in their entirety are now distributed among a large number of KRNIC members instead.
The total amount of address space delegated to KRNIC has not changed. Prior states of APNIC’s registry publications have not been updated so the distinction in the status of the resources can be understood to apply to past events, but these changes are only visible in current (and future) versions of APNIC’s registry publications.
Future work
The APNIC Secretariat aims to carry out similar reconciliation efforts with the other NIRs on an ongoing basis. The results of those efforts will be published as amendments to APNIC’s address registry.
If you have any questions about this work, please contact helpdesk@apnic.net for more information.
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