Dear Brian,
Are there detailed instructions for datacenters about how they should be creating abuse-c records?
There is some documentation out there: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/denis/creating-and-finding-abuse-contacts-in-t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5QsjfwHZwM http://www.ripe.net/lir-services/training/e-learning/ripe-database/downloads...
I've been in contact with a datacenter that has one generic abuse-c contact for their organization, but then each individual network has some remarks saying 'please contact this email address instead'. If you email their general abuse email, they tell you to check WHOIS and email the address in the comments.
This completely breaks the RIPE abuse contact finder, as well as my scripts to automatically send abuse emails. They don't seem to see the problem with this, so I was hoping for some decent documentation I could show them about it.
How should this generally be handled for network providers with lots of reassigned subnets? Am I right in believing this pretty much defeats the purpose of the abuse-c record?
This exactly was one of the many reasons for establishing the abuse-c. The abuse-c is hierarchical. Which means if you create one for your biggest net range all subranges will be covered by this one as well. If you want to have different abuse contacts for different subranges you have to create different abuse-c. You can use abuse-c for as many net ranges as you want. Please let the DC people know that remarks and are not gonna be used by the abuse finder as soon as transition phase has been finished. As far as I know, they should have already been contacted by RIPE NCC about this policy change. If you have more questions, please let us know. Thanks, Tobias — RIPE AA-WG Chair