[ih] NACRS?

[dave o'leary]

At 06:45 PM 2/27/2003 -0500, Susan Harris wrote:
> > NACRS were evidently used in the 1980s and early 1990s as a kind of
> > template submitted to SRI by email by individuals requesting connection
> > to the network. Is this correct? Does anyone recall what the acronym
> > stands for or anything about the procedures by which NACRS were
> > typically used?
>
>During the NSFNET the regional networks used Network Announcement/Change
>Requests to update the AS690 route table. NACRs were gracefully
>replaced by RADB route objects when the NSFNET went away in 1995.

Just to be a bit more clear - initially EGP and post cutover, the BGP
protocol was used to update the routing tables.

NACRS were used to update to policy database, reflecting which advertisements
should be accepted by which regional and international networks.
Since there were plenty of sites that were dual homed, and EGP did
not provide much semantic for indicating which path should be preferred
for a given destination, the policy database reflected which advertisement
should be considered primary/secondary/tertiary for a given prefix
when it was advertised into the backbone in multiple locations.

The NACR consisted of an electronic form which had to be submitted
by one of the designated individuals at a given regional network.
I don't remember the details but I believe someone at Merit contacted the
various regional folks directly when a network under their purview
changed status (so the policy for a given prefix couldn't be changed
without buy-in from the others involved).

I don't remember the exact dates when these began, but it wasn't
until the early 90's.  In the mid and late 80's with the original FuzzBall
based NSFnet, we approximately coordinated all this manually.
Mark Oros (then at Cornell) was one of the early coordinators of the
policies, which were at that time mostly implemented via gated.conf
files.

                                                 dave