Summary

  • An inetnum status such as ASSIGNED PA describes a registry class and the record’s place in the address hierarchy.
  • It does not say that the range is routed, reachable, serving customers or healthy; those conclusions require separate evidence.

The word status invites the wrong question. An incident analyst sees status: ASSIGNED PA and may instinctively hear “up”. A due-diligence team sees ALLOCATED PA and may hear “controlled and in production”. RIPE’s own documentation gives the field a narrower and more useful job.

An inetnum object records an IPv4 allocation or assignment. Its status field is mandatory and single-valued. The RIPE Database object documentation says the field identifies the type of data in the object and its relative position within the address hierarchy. Classes including ALLOCATED PA, ALLOCATED-ASSIGNED PA, ASSIGNED PA, SUB-ALLOCATED PA, AGGREGATED-BY-LIR, ASSIGNED PI and LEGACY distinguish how a block entered the registry structure and how it relates to records above or below it.

That hierarchy is enforced, not decorative. The database business rules give a concrete example: an object with ASSIGNED PA may be created only as a child of an ALLOCATED PA object. The field therefore helps software and readers reason about valid parent-child relationships. It is an administrative control surface.

The policy layer says the same thing in operational terms. RIPE-826 defines an allocation as a block from which assignments are taken. It requires allocations and assignments to be registered and requires the range, contact information and status to remain correct. Correct here means correct as registration data. The policy does not turn the field into a probe of packet delivery.

A live record makes the distinction concrete. A captured RIPE Database REST query for 193.0.0.0 returned the range 193.0.0.0 - 193.0.7.255, the netname RIPE-NCC, a note that it is used for RIPE NCC infrastructure, and status: ASSIGNED PA. The same response recorded a last modification on 19 March 2026. Those are useful registry facts. They still do not establish whether the whole range is announced at this instant, whether every address responds, which service uses a particular address, or whether an application is healthy.

RIPE’s data model keeps the boundary visible. Its primary-object list describes a separate route object as an IPv4 route advertised on the Internet. Even that object is a routing-registry statement, not a live availability test. Current BGP observation and active reachability measurement remain separate layers again.

The disciplined reading sequence is therefore simple. Use inetnum status to identify the registry class and hierarchy. Inspect organisation, maintainer and policy records for the relevant authority question. Consult route data and independent BGP observations for routing. Use active measurements and service telemetry for reachability and health. Each source can answer its own question without being stretched into an answer it never recorded.

This boundary does not make the RIPE Database less important. It makes it more dependable. A field becomes decision-grade when analysts preserve its defined meaning, capture its timestamp, and refuse to convert an administrative classification into an outage report.

Sources