Initialisation

Before running Routinator for the first time, you must prepare its working environment. You do this using the init command. This will prepare both the directory for the local RPKI cache, as well as the Trust Anchor Locator (TAL) directory.

By default, both directories will be located under $HOME/.rpki-cache, but you can change their locations via the command line options --repository-dir and --tal-dir.

TALs provide hints for the trust anchor certificates to be used both to discover and validate all RPKI content. The five TALs — one for each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) — are bundled with Routinator and installed by the init command.

Warning

Using the TAL from ARIN, the RIR for the United States, Canada as well as many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, requires you to read and accept their Relying Party Agreement before you can use it. Running the init command will provide you with instructions.

routinator init
Before we can install the ARIN TAL, you must have read
and agree to the ARIN Relying Party Agreement (RPA).
It is available at

https://www.arin.net/resources/manage/rpki/rpa.pdf

If you agree to the RPA, please run the command
again with the --accept-arin-rpa option.

Running the init command with the --accept-arin-rpa option will create the TAL directory and copy the five Trust Anchor Locator files into it.

routinator init --accept-arin-rpa

If you decide you cannot agree to the ARIN RPA terms, the --decline-arin-rpa option will install all TALs except the one for ARIN. If, at a later point, you wish to use the ARIN TAL anyway, you can add it to your current installation using the --force option, to force the installation of all TALs.

Performing a Test Run

To see if Routinator has been initialised correctly and your firewall allows the required connections, it is recommended to perform an initial test run. You can do this by having Routinator print a validated ROA payload (VRP) list with the vrps subcommand, and using -v to increase the log level so you can verify if Routinator establishes rsync and RRDP connections as expected.

routinator -vv vrps

Now, you can see how Routinator connects to the RPKI trust anchors, downloads the the contents of the repositories to your machine, verifies it and produces a list of validated ROA payloads in the default CSV format to standard output. Because it is expected that the state of the entire RPKI is not perfect as all times, you may see several warnings during the process about objects that are either stale or failed cryptographic verification. From a cold start, this process will take a couple of minutes.

routinator -vv vrps
rsyncing from rsync://repository.lacnic.net/rpki/.
rsync://repository.lacnic.net/rpki: Running command "rsync" "--timeout=300" "-rltz" "--delete" "rsync://repository.lacnic.net/rpki/" "/Users/alex/.rpki-cache/repository/rsync/repository.lacnic.net/rpki/"
Found valid trust anchor https://rpki.ripe.net/ta/ripe-ncc-ta.cer. Processing.
RRDP https://rrdp.ripe.net/notification.xml: Updating server
RRDP https://rrdp.ripe.net/notification.xml: updating from snapshot.
Found valid trust anchor https://rpki.afrinic.net/repository/AfriNIC.cer. Processing.
RRDP https://rrdp.afrinic.net/notification.xml: Updating server
RRDP https://rrdp.afrinic.net/notification.xml: updating from snapshot.
Found valid trust anchor https://tal.apnic.net/apnic.cer. Processing.
RRDP https://rrdp.apnic.net/notification.xml: Updating server
RRDP https://rrdp.apnic.net/notification.xml: updating from snapshot.
Found valid trust anchor https://rrdp.arin.net/arin-rpki-ta.cer. Processing.
RRDP https://rrdp.arin.net/notification.xml: Updating server
RRDP https://rrdp.arin.net/notification.xml: updating from snapshot.
rsync://repository.lacnic.net/rpki: successfully completed.
Found valid trust anchor rsync://repository.lacnic.net/rpki/lacnic/rta-lacnic-rpki.cer. Processing.
rsyncing from rsync://rpki-repo.registro.br/repo/.
rsync://rpki-repo.registro.br/repo: Running command "rsync" "--timeout=300" "-rltz" "--delete" "rsync://rpki-repo.registro.br/repo/" "/Users/alex/.rpki-cache/repository/rsync/rpki-repo.registro.br/repo/"
rsync://rpki-repo.registro.br/repo: successfully completed.
RRDP https://rrdp.rpki.nlnetlabs.nl/rrdp/notification.xml: Updating server
RRDP https://rrdp.rpki.nlnetlabs.nl/rrdp/notification.xml: updating from snapshot.
...
ASN,IP Prefix,Max Length,Trust Anchor
AS137884,103.116.116.0/23,23,apnic
AS9003,91.151.112.0/20,20,ripe
AS38553,120.72.19.0/24,24,apnic
AS58045,37.209.242.0/24,24,ripe
AS9583,202.177.175.0/24,24,apnic
AS50629,2a0f:ba80::/29,29,ripe
AS398085,2602:801:a008::/48,48,arin
AS21050,83.96.22.0/24,24,ripe
AS55577,183.82.223.0/24,24,apnic
AS44444,157.167.73.0/24,24,ripe
AS197695,194.67.97.0/24,24,ripe
...