The iptools package contains various datasets to aid users in handling IP addresses. While the plan is to keep these datasets as up-to-date as possible, there’s no doubt that there will be some gap between data changing and a package update being available - so the package also contains functions for refreshing the locally-stored versions of each dataset. This vignette describes both.
Three primary datasets are available, all sourced from the IANA. These, cover, respectively, the IPv4 address space assignments, the IPv4 special-purpose address assignments, and the assignments for port numbers and services.
The IPv4 address space assignments (iana_assignments) is the registry of what chunks of the IPv4 space have been reserved, who by, and for what purpose. The IPv4 special-purpose assignments (iana\_special\_assignments) are those sub-units of the IPv4 space that have been reserved for specific, special purposes - an example is 192.0.2.0/24, a range for documentation purposes. The port registry (iana_ports) contains the ports that are reserved, and what services they are reserved for - a canonical example is port 80, which is registered for something called “World Wide Web HTTP” by a “Tim Berners Lee”.
Each dataset can be accessed with data(dataset_name), which makes it available to the user, and consists of a data.frame. See the documentation on individual datasets (e.g. ?iana_assignments) for more details.
To avoid users having datasets that get out of date, and no obvious way to fix it (short of waiting for a package update), iptools pairs with each of its datasets an equivalent function to refresh it. If the iana_assignments dataset is out of date, for example, you’d run iana\_assignments\_refresh():
library(iptools)
data(iana_assignments)
str(iana_assignments)
'data.frame': 151 obs. of 5 variables:
$ prefix : chr "49.0.0.0/8" "50.0.0.0/8" "51.0.0.0/8" "52.0.0.0/8" ...
$ designation: chr "APNIC" "ARIN" "UK Government Department for Work and Pensions" ...
$ date : chr "2010-08" "2010-02" "1994-08" "1991-12" ...
$ whois : chr "whois.apnic.net" "whois.arin.net" "whois.ripe.net" "whois.arin.net" ...
$ status : chr "ALLOCATED" "ALLOCATED" "LEGACY" "LEGACY" ...
iana_assignments_refresh()
[1] TRUE
data("iana_assignments")
str(iana_assignments)
'data.frame': 256 obs. of 5 variables:
$ prefix : chr "0.0.0.0/8" "1.0.0.0/8" "2.0.0.0/8" "3.0.0.0/8" ...
$ designation: chr "IANA - Local Identification" "APNIC" "RIPE NCC" ...
$ date : chr "1981-09" "2010-01" "2009-09" "1994-05" ...
$ whois : chr "" "whois.apnic.net" "whois.ripe.net" "whois.arin.net" ...
$ status : chr "RESERVED" "ALLOCATED" "ALLOCATED" "LEGACY" ...