Thanks for the links Alan. You're right, I think my eyes might be bigger than my stomach for the moment, I will do some investigation and work before I start the project. Cheers, alemangui

Hi Alan, Thanks a lot for your reply. I took a look to the links you sent me. I guess my main goal is to create a program able to analize the whole Internet's BGP table. My main issue is that, sometimes, big chunks of IPv4 space are announced (i.e., 172.16.0.0/16), but also more specific and smaller routes are announced too (i.e., 172.16.64.0/18). So there are two redundant entries :confused:. I would like to figure out a way to end up with a list of non-redundant IP addresses, just the big chunks. I am thinking of maybe comparing all of them and storing them in a list, however, with a nearly-6-million line BGP table, I wonder if there's a more efficient method. Thanks a lot for all your help, alemangui

Hello everyone, I am an IT student, and a beginner in networking issues. As a project, I want to develop a program to know the percentage of all routed IPv4 addresses by country. What I have so far is a class that maps IPv4 addesses to their country. I downloaded a Cisco format Internet routing table from RouteViews project site (http://www.routeviews.org) which is like an output of the "show ip bgp" command, and successfully extracted every BGP prefix, calculated the amount of addresses it had (depending on the mask) and added that number to the country to where it belongs. The problem is that I got as a result ridiculously enormous numbers. I saw that, in the routing table I downloaded, there are some "redundancies", for example, addresses 4.0.0.0/9, 4.0.0.0, 4.21.103.0/24, etc etc where al advertised individually. I realised I was counting the same IPv4 addresses many times, by adding those of 4.0.0.0/8 and 4.0.0.0/9 and 4.21.103.0/24 despite being most the same. So I am a little stuck here. I wonder if there is another way to see the routed addresses in the IPv4 world, or if there is an approach I should take towards analising the Internet routing table. I would greatly appreciate any help and want to thank you very much in advance. Cheers alemangui