Subject: Re: [alto] ALTO client protocol and Autonomous System Numbers

From: Tao Ma <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 15:03:21 +0800

Hello Sebastian,

> Applications can already map IPs to ASNs using information from a BGP

> Looking Glass.  To do so, they must download a file of about 1.5MB
> when compressed (as of October 2008, with all information not needed
> for IP to ASN mapping removed) and periodically (perhaps monthly)
> refresh it.

|This sounds rather vague to me ... which protocol do I have to use for
|download from which address? Which file format is it, i.e., what kind
|of parser do I need?

|As your protocol proposal is based on HTTP anyway why not just always
|offer the file for download from the ALTO server?
  I think what Penno means here is that download BGP maptable is just
a currently used method to map IPs to ASNs. But in ALTO protocol, this
mapping can be implemented
by the interface of GetNetworkMap. So this mapping to download the BGP
file does not belong to ALTO protocol. To avoid the complications
arises if an ALTO client
does not know how to handle ASNs or maps them in a wrong way, we might
choose the way to map by the GetNetworkMap identifier for ALTO
clients.

Regards,

——Tao Ma
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Mobile life and new
media lab.