Hi Colin Some answers to your questions. The benefit of the irt object is it works hierarchicaly. You can reference it in the top level inetnum of your network. It will then be retrieved when any inetnum is queried within that network. It can be placed at any point in a network and applies to the referencing inetnum and all the more specifics. This makes administration much easier than a remarks attribute in each inetnum. If you change the e-mail address it is easier to change it in one place only. More work was done on the "-c" and "-C" query flags some time ago. The "-c" behaviour is now the default on all queries for address space and works well. Using the "-C" flag reverts this to the old behaviour. Regards Denis Walker Database Group RIPE NCC Colin Silcock wrote:

Hello all,

We’re a web-hoster with our own network and are a member of RIPE etc. So far in we have an abuse mailbox listed in the remarks of each of our inetnum objects, which has worked well for us so far.

However, I notice that there is also an abuse-mailbox attribute associated with the IRT object, which can in turn be referenced from an inetnum object with the mnt-irt attribute.

Does anyone here use the IRT objects? Is this something we should be doing also, or instead of writing the abuse email address in a remark? I read in an old thread in the archives that the “whois -c” option which is supposed to look up the associated IRT object doesn’t work yet, although that might have changed by now.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Colin