[as112-ops] AS112 Project web site: a new beta

[Matthew Pounsett]

We're happy to announce a long-overdue redesign of the AS112 Project web site.  In addition to a general cleanup and reorganization to make information easier to find (and read), and updating and rewriting much of the documentation on the site, we have significantly overhauled the way the operator listing works.

Where the listing used to be hand-edited HTML, which resulted in information being added in an inconsistent way, we are now generating the list from structured data (JSON).  We are also periodically polling PeeringDB's API to pull information about IXP instances, many of which are automatically published there using PeeringDB's "IX-F Member Export Schema".  We have also added the ability to properly describe multiple instances hosted by the same operator, and to mark (and cross link) instances in the operator listing that are also listed in the IXP data.  There is an example of the new structured data at the end of this email.

In addition to making the site cleaner and easier to read, we hope that structuring the data this way will make it easier to work with the data in automated ways in the future.  For example, we think it would be useful to periodically scan the publicly-reachable instances to check their availability, and to potentially do garbage-collection on instances that have been taken down, organizations that no longer exist, or stats URLs that no longer work.  We are also adding the capability to accept (but not to publish) a contact address for a role account (such as hostmaster, or NOC) to use to contact organizations in the event of issues with their instance.

A beta version of the new site is currently available at <https://beta.as112.net/>.  It should be going live within the next week.

We invite people to give us feedback either on the list or by emailing ops at as112.net.

In addition to general feedback on the site, we would invite operators to have a look at their own listing and let us know if anything needs updating.  We're aware there has been a lot of bitrot over the years, and there are many sites listed there with broken company or stats URLs, or both.  Although we haven't begun doing a survey of the unicast addresses, we would not be surprised to find many of them unreachable.

We are also hopeful that some volunteers would be willing to write us some new How-To documents for various configurations.  We have a few in the References section that were there, but difficult to find, in the old site.  However, they are all over a decade old, and could use their own refresh.

And last, but certainly not least, we would like to acknowledge the grant from ARIN which allowed us to prioritize this work.  Without their support we would have been able to get this done any time soon.

Matt Pounsett
DNS-OARC Systems Engineering



Some example data from the old and new sites:

     <tr>
       <td>DE-CIX</td>
       <td>Frankfurt, DE; Hamburg, DE; New York City, USA; and
       Istanbul, Turkey</td>
       <td>(on IXP fabric)</td>
       <td></td>
       <td></td>
     </tr>

The above HTML is converted to the JSON below.

 {
   "name": "DE-CIX",
   "url": null,
   "instances": [
     {
       "location": "Frankfurt, DE",
       "unicast": [],
       "transit_as": [],
       "stats_url": null,
       "ixp_id": 31
     },
     {
       "location": "Hamburg, DE",
       "unicast": [],
       "transit_as": [],
       "stats_url": null,
       "ixp_id": 74
     },
     {
       "location": "New York City, USA",
       "unicast": [],
       "transit_as": [],
       "stats_url": null,
       "ixp_id": 804
     },
     {
       "location": "Istanbul, Turkey",
       "unicast": [],
       "transit_as": [],
       "stats_url": null,
       "ixp_id": 1150
     }
   ]
 }

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP
URL: <https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/private/as112-ops/attachments/20230927/2e6ba752/attachment.sig>