BGP 0.4.0 released

04Feb09

BGP (an application, not the protocol) is now available on the App Store.

It enables you to do the following tasks on your iPhone:

• look up basic Autonomous System (AS) information, such as the name of organization, for a given AS number
• run ‘show ip bgp <ip addr>’ command on one of route view servers and display routing entries returned

AS Number lookup

BGP (again, the application, you know) currently sends its query to whois.radb.net so BGP 0.4.0 cannot handle AS Numbers which are not registered in RADB.
BGP 0.4.1, which is pending review by Apple, will try whois.radb.net first and if it fails, it falls back to a whois server of an appropriate RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, or AfriNIC) by consulting a local copy of IANA AS Number allocation table.

AS Path lookup

BGP connects to one of the route view servers and runs ‘show ip bgp <ip addr>’ on it and displays the BGP routing table entries the route server returns.

That’s pretty much it for now. I hope you like it.

Update: Feb 6

I found out that there’s a review on the App Store in US reporting a crash during AS Path lookup. I (apparently) didn’t catch that issue while I was testing before uploading the app to Apple for review but, after trying various IP addresses as input, I found out a case in which a route server returned the result in a format that the app didn’t expect. I’ve fixed the code in my svn repository
a) not to crash due to data in an unexpected format (I should’ve done that in the first place.)
b) to appropriately parse route view result in that newly found format as well.

I will send the rebuilt app to Apple as soon as the version currently in review (0.4.1) is approved (or rejected for that matter). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Feb 11

I uploaded 0.4.2, which fixes a bug described above. It’s pending Apple’s review.

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Tags: BGP, iPhone