Datasets in the iptools package
In iptools: Manipulate, Validate and Resolve 'IP' Addresses

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.

Available datasets

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.

Refreshing datasets

To avoid users having datasets that get out of date, and no obvious way to fix it (short of waiting for a package update), iptools pairs with each of its datasets an equivalent function to refresh it. If the iana_assignments dataset is out of date, for example, you'd run iana\_assignments\_refresh():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" ...