December 2023 - db-wg - mailman.ripe.net

Proposal to allow non-ASCII characters in "org-name:", "person:" and "role:" attributes
by Edward Shryane 28 May '24

28 May '24

Dear colleagues, Currently the RIPE database only allows a subset of ASCII characters in the "org-name:", "person:" and "role:" attributes, for a few reasons including: * These attributes are also a look-up key and the Whois protocol does not allow specifying character sets in queries. * RPSL names are ASCII according to RFC2622 * Using a normalised name makes the object easier to query * Reading a normalised name is easier to interpret However there are some drawbacks to forcing names to only use a subset of ASCII characters: * Organisations, roles and persons cannot use their actual name if it includes characters outside this subset. * Normalisation is not standard, but is an interpretation done by each maintainer, e.g. characters could be excluded or converted in different ways. Since we support the Latin-1 character set in the RIPE database, I propose we also allow non-ASCII Latin-1 characters in these attributes. Querying for a name can be done either using the latin-1 characters (proposed) or a normalised, ASCII representation (currently). The normalised version will be generated by Whois and stored in a database index for querying. The primary key will also be generated from the normalised version. Please let me know your feedback. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC --- Whois attribute verbose description (copied from the help text). org-name -------- Specifies the name of the organisation that this organisation object represents in the RIPE Database. This is an ASCII-only text attribute. The restriction is because this attribute is a look-up key and the whois protocol does not allow specifying character sets in queries. The user can put the name of the organisation in non-ASCII character sets in the "descr:" attribute if required. A list of 1 to 30 words separated by white space. A word is made up of ASCII alphanumeric characters and additionally: ][)(._"*@,&:!'`+/- A word may have up to 64 characters and is not case sensitive. Each word can have any combination of the above characters with no restriction on the start or end of a word. person ------ Specifies the full name of an administrative, technical or zone contact person for other objects in the database. It should contain 2 to 10 words. A word is made up of ASCII alphanumeric characters and additionally: .`'_- The first word should begin with a letter. At least one other word should also begin with a letter. Max 64 characters can be used in each word. role ---- Specifies the full name of a role entity, e.g. RIPE DBM. A list of 1 to 30 words separated by white space. A word is made up of ASCII alphanumeric characters and additionally: ][)(._"*@,&:!'`+/- A word may have up to 64 characters and is not case sensitive. Each word can have any combination of the above characters with no restriction on the start or end of a word.

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Preferred names in the database
by Harry Cross 22 May '24

22 May '24

Dear all (copying this to both the Diversity list and the Database list), I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend and recovering from Rome. I’d like to begin thinking about a proposal for preferred names in the database/on resources. Some may have noticed this week (and for a bit prior), I have begun going by Harri instead of Harry. At the moment there is no correct way for me to represent this in the database, as an LIR the details have to match my legal name. I may think about going through the legal processes to change this soon (albeit in the UK this is easier than a lot of places). I know a few people hold their resources under a shell company for this purpose, (e.g I could incorporate Harri Cross Limited to hold the resources and be in the database). This applies to end users who hold PI or ASNs alongside LIRs. It would be good for us to think about a way for these preferred names (and pronouns?) to be shown in the database alongside the process for changing the name of an end user. I know the preferred way a lot of people in this situation would like this to be handled is to totally mask the legal name in the database. The NCC could still validate legal names to know who they are working with - and we will need some compromise here I suspect. A complete lack of verification is of course a bad thing. I have experienced talking to the NCC when handling end users in these situations who have legally name changed and the process seems to be incredibly hard with the lack of understanding on documentation for name changes. Responses from the Registry have included “How can we be sure that <oldName> and <newName> are not identical twins?” (Which in my mind, is rather disrespectful). I also have another name change in process that is being stonewalled by a lack of understanding of documents in different jurisdictions for this. Kind Regards, Harri Sent from Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

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geolocation purpose
by Maria Stafyla 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

Hello all, As you may have seen in the minutes from the RIPE NCC Executive Board's most recent meeting (on 6 October 2023), the Executive Board approved the amendments to the RIPE Database Terms and Conditions. The RIPE Database Working Group had reached consensus that the provision of geolocation information should be included in the list of purposes of the RIPE Database. Accordingly, the approved amendments to the RIPE Database Terms and Conditions include this new purpose and replace the pronouns 'he/she' with the gender-neutral singular 'they'. You can access the RIPE NCC Executive Board Meeting minutes at: https://www.ripe.net/about-us/executive-board/minutes/2023/minutes-168th-ex… And the updated RIPE Database Terms and Conditions are available at: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/db/support/documentation/terms In the next whois release, we will remove the prefix size validation rules, which we had to implement to restrict unnecessary processing of personal data when geolocation was not yet a defined purpose of the RIPE Database. If you have any questions, please let us know. Kind regards, Maria Stafyla Senior Legal Counsel RIPE NCC

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Warning: This Syncupdates request used insecure HTTP
by Peter Hessler 27 Dec '23

27 Dec '23

I was doing some object updates / creation on https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/syncupdates and I got this warning while doing so: ***Warning: This Syncupdates request used insecure HTTP, which may be removed in a future release. Please switch to HTTPS. I'm using https to apps.db.ripe.net, so I assume it is the backend that is in http mode. Can this be updated before insecure http mode is removed? Thanks! -- Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young

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RIPE Database Quarterly Planning Q1 2024
by Edward Shryane 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

Dear colleagues, The next quarterly plans for the RIPE Database are now available on our website: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/db/quarterly-planning In this quarter, we will continue with our day-to-day operations and work on the implementation of the RDAP 'RIR Search' feature. By sharing these plans with you, we want to inform you of the ongoing developments on the RIPE Database and get your feedback on other work items you would like us to focus on. If you have comments or questions around this, we hope you'll let us know on the list or you can always contact the DB team directly at ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net . Regards, Ed Shryane RIPE NCC

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Whois 1.109.1 Release
by Edward Shryane 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

Dear colleagues, Following the Whois 1.109 release on Monday, we found a regression affecting all RDAP queries for an organisation entity containing a "country:" attribute. We have now deployed a Whois 1.109.1 release which fixes this regression to the Release Candidate environment for testing. We plan to deploy to production on Wednesday 20th December. The data in the RC environment is a dummified copy of production from 16th November. The release is tagged on GitHub: https://github.com/RIPE-NCC/whois/releases/tag/acc20f73 More information on the Release Candidate environment can be found on our website: https://apps.db.ripe.net/docs/Release-Notes/ Please let us know if you find any issues with this release in the RC environment. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC

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Re: [db-wg] Proposal to allow non-ASCII characters in "org-name:", "person:" and "role:" attributes
by Ángel González Berdasco 17 Dec '23

17 Dec '23

It's nice to see you here, Marco. I don't think it will be possible to change the default without potentially causing problems for clients not expecting that. Adding that -C option to the server seems appropriate, and unless you expect that at one point there will be no clients not providing that, you will face the issue that if the default changes from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, old clients will be wrong, as you can't get every client to be updated at the same time. The most similar situation would be if you had a predefined epoch at which both server and clients would change the encoding. But it still requires all clients to have been updated, and the date having been agreed far in advance (and not posponed later!). A situation that could help would be if the server marked the encoding so that the client could recognise the output is no longer iso-8859-1, but utf-8, such as including a BOM (although it may be preferable to include that inside a comment rather than at the beginning, I see benefits both ways), and thus old-but-not-ancient clients could autodetect the switch. Most likely, the server default will not change, though. Best regards -------- Original message -------- From: Marco d'Itri via db-wg <db-wg(a)ripe.net> Date: 12/18/23 00:44 (GMT+01:00) To: Piotr Strzyzewski <piotr(a)internetsailor.net> Cc: db-wg <db-wg(a)ripe.net> Subject: Re: [db-wg] Proposal to allow non-ASCII characters in "org-name:", "person:" and "role:" attributes On Dec 03, Piotr Strzyzewski via db-wg <db-wg(a)ripe.net> wrote: > As the UTF-8 topic was briefly discussed during DB-WG session at RIPE87 > in Rome, I would like to propose moving forward with it. If that means a > topic for first (?) interim meeting, let it be. Let me know please if > this works for you. Thanks in advance. In Rome I talked a bit with Edward about this. Background: I am the author of the whois client used by all Linux distributions. I fully agree that switching to UTF-8 is desirable, but we cannot just change the encoding of port 43 without major side effects. Since version 5.5.4 (december 2019), the client assumes that the output of whois.ripe.net is Latin 1 and then transcodes it to the system encoding. Receiving unexpected UTF-8 would cause mojibake. My suggestion is to add a new query "command line" option to specify the desired encoding (limiting it to either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8), as supported by other whois servers. -C is the most common choice, but maybe it would be better to use --charset to not waste a single letter option. See https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/blob/next/servers_charset_list . In a few years then it will be much easier to switch the default from Latin 1 to UTF-8. -- ciao, Marco

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Whois Release 1.109
by Edward Shryane 04 Dec '23

04 Dec '23

Dear colleagues, RIPE Database release 1.109 has been deployed to the Release Candidate environment for testing. We plan to deploy to production on Monday 4th December. The data in the RC environment is a dummified copy of production from 16th November. This release has the following main changes: * RDAP redaction (#1317) * Removed organisation "e-mail" from RDAP to match Whois and added to redaction list (#1333) * Removed geofeed prefix validation (#1326) * Added HTTPS Support to Whois Backend (#1329) * Support HTTP Basic authentication (#1342) * Support HTTPS Client Certificate Authentication (#1343) * Initialize NRTMv4 from command-line (JMX) (#1310) * Use parallel stream to generate NRTMv4 snapshots more quickly (#1309) * Include AS-SET in RIPE-NONAUTH dump (#1352) The release notes are on the website: https://apps.db.ripe.net/docs/Release-Notes/#ripe-database-release-1-109 More information on the Release Candidate environment can be found on our website: https://apps.db.ripe.net/docs/Release-Notes/ Please let us know if you find any issues with this release in the RC environment. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC

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