- db-wg - mailman.ripe.net

Re: Privacy, Broadband, & the Database
by Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet 30 Nov '00

30 Nov '00

=> I'm writing for your opinions, suggestions, and comments regarding updating => the RIPE database with assignments made for broadband (xDSL) customers. As => you may or may not be aware, ADSL is now being offered in the UK, which => has very strict data protection laws. We offer ADSL services as a NATted = =IP addresses and data related to them is international resource. =I don't think you should apply any law in UK when we talk about =RIPE(.int) resources. But that doesn't mean the people *collecting* customer related info *and transferring that data to somewhere abroad* would be exempt from local laws. Quite the opposite holds true for many (most?) countries... =I assume we are still supposed to maintain single nic-hdl per person. =What's the plan now, if my LIR would need to refer to the same contact =person? It doesn't make sense to direct any calls to your LIR, if the =problem lies at customer network at our LIR's addresses. It depends on the level of "responsibility" and functionality granted to and exercised by that end site. As I've said in a private mail already, we should ask the question about the usefulness of "assigning" (in the good old sense) very small amounts of addresses to sites which are tied in to the services of their provider anyway. I guess most of the ADSL, dial-up, cable-TV connection assignments sh/could be reviewed from that point of view. => phone: +44-845-272-0444 => remarks: Phone is Demon Internet Helpdesk = =The same rule should apply to all assignments. If a (home) network =contact person doesn't want to be 'listed', s/he can try to live =without real network and buy NAT from a provider. That's a very valid point. =If people think RIPE db contains too much sensitive information, =I would rather see the query results restricted somehow. For example =operators (LIRs) could have full query access, and the others =could merely receive pointers to the LIR for further information. This idea happens to pop always now and then, again and again. the last time I heard a proposal along those lines was at the Brisbane APNIC meeting. I then asked the following question: "So you are going to collect information, but you are going to hide it. Fair enough. Have you thought about criteria and/or mechanisms to disclose that information, either to entites with a "valid" interest and/or to law enforcement?" I did not receive a useful answer. Just as a virtual poll - would anyone in the RIPE region care to propose criteria and/or mechanism? Wilfried. _________________________________:_____________________________________ Wilfried Woeber : e-mail: Woeber(a)CC.UniVie.ac.at UniVie Computer Center - ACOnet : Tel: +43 1 4277 - 140 33 Universitaetsstrasse 7 : Fax: +43 1 4277 - 9 140 A-1010 Vienna, Austria, Europe : RIPE-DB: WW144, PGP keyID 0xF0ACB369 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Problems with windows? re-boot! Problems with unix? be root!

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Re: Privacy, Broadband, & the Database
by Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet 30 Nov '00

30 Nov '00

>The name and address info in the RIPE database needs to contain the >person (or organisation) responsible for a certain amount of IP space, >in my opinion. I agreee, and the important word here is "responsible". >So, if an ISP wants to be responsible for the IP space it hands out to >customers, then the ISP should be free to fill in their own name and >address. Doing that means that an assignment (*to the customer*, in the traditional sense) has not been performed. >This gives ISPs the freedom to fill the RIPE db with names >and addresses of customers (that saves them the hassle of dealing with >for example abuse coming from that site), or putting their own name >in it (meaning they have to respond actively to for example abuse reports, >which is the ISP's job anyway). This is very similar to my reasoning regarding the usefulness of performing an assignment for a (small) site which does not fully (independently and in a responsible way) manage their address space. Wilfried.

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Privacy, Broadband, & the Database
by Sam Bradford 29 Nov '00

29 Nov '00

Hello all. (Apologies if you got a 'subscribe' message from me earlier. I wasn't thinking about Majordomo for some reason.) I'm writing for your opinions, suggestions, and comments regarding updating the RIPE database with assignments made for broadband (xDSL) customers. As you may or may not be aware, ADSL is now being offered in the UK, which has very strict data protection laws. We offer ADSL services as a NATted service (with one large entry in the RIPE database like for dial-up customers) and a non-NAT service that includes an IP assignment. Our concern is that a large percentage of our non-NAT ADSL customers are either home users or home businesses. Updating the RIPE database with an IP assignment requires an end-user Admin contact, and the person object requires a telephone number. Worst case scenario is that we update the database for a home business or a home user with the customer's telephone number, his teenage daughter enters a chat room, and you can imagine the rest... After brief consultation with the RIPE NCC Hostmasters, we have begun updating the database with our role object as Tech Contact and the customer as Admin contact. For the phone number, we are using our own, noting as much in a 'remarks' field. For example: inetnum: 62.49.8.64 - 62.49.8.79 netname: PYAR-ADSL descr: DEMON ADSL CUSTOMER country: GB admin-c: PY84-RIPE tech-c: DHG5-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PA notify: hostmaster(a)demon.net mnt-by: AS2529-MNT changed: hostmaster(a)demon.net 20001115 source: RIPE <snip DHG5-RIPE> person: Phil Yarranton address: GB phone: +44-845-272-0444 nic-hdl: PY84-RIPE remarks: Phone is Demon Internet Helpdesk notify: hostmaster(a)demon.net mnt-by: AS2529-MNT changed: hostmaster(a)demon.net 20001115 source: RIPE However, I'm not sure that is the best option, and could lead to inconsistency. At what point do we determine (and should we determine?) if an obvoius business customer is home-based or office-based? Should we have one set of rules for the database for leased line & ISDN customers and another for ADSL? Or one set for business customers (regardless of home-based or office-based) and another for home users? Looking forward to your comments. :-) Sam Bradford ----------------------------------------------------------------- sam bradford, senior hostmaster sam.bradford(a)demon.net Demon Internet / Thus plc . hostmaster(a)demon.net Tel: +44-845-272-0666 . . http://www.demon.net/ Fax: +44-20-8371-1285 t h u s http://www.thus.net/

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About the Hermes Project
by Andrea Carmignani 06 Nov '00

06 Nov '00

Hi my name is Andrea Carmignani, I belong to the network research group of the university of Roma3. We developed a tool, known as Hermes, able to explore the Internet topology. Its based mainly on the information coming from the databases belonging to some Internet Resource Record like RIPE, RADB, VERIO, CABLE & WIRE, ARIN and BELL in addiction to the BGP routing information coming from the Route Projects of the Oregon University. Hermes is able to dynamically explore the Internet Topology, providing a Map representing the As and their interconnections. For any AS present on the map, it can also provide several information like: AS name, Maintainers, Routing Policies, list of the known border Router, list of the routes originated by the AS and the As macro which the AS belongs. We will be grateful if you could give us some feedback on the real utility of this tool and hopefully some suggestion able to improving it. Please visit the URL: http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~hermes here you will find a more detailed paper, some screenshot galleries, a screencam of the tool working and you will able to use Hermes through the Applet provided. I think this is the right mailing list where to post this news if not I apologize otherwise Thanks in Advance Andrea

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reimp.ripe.net (rpsl.ripe.net) server is temporarily unavailable
by Andrei Robachevsky 27 Oct '00

27 Oct '00

Dear Colleagues, Yesterday a machine that was used for the new prototype DB server crashed and could not be restarted due to hardware problems. We are working on this and will bring the prototype server up as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience. Regards, Andrei Robachevsky DB Group Manager RIPE NCC

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Re: mark
by Randy Bush 29 Sep '00

29 Sep '00

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > person: Mark Bold > address: Verio/UK sigh. apologies. i think i made this same address book stoopid once before. sorreeeee. randy

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RIPE NCC to shut down rpslii.ripe.net on November 6
by RIPE Database Administration 22 Sep '00

22 Sep '00

Dear All, [This does *not* affect the RIPE whois database at whois.ripe.net] As you know, the RIPE NCC has provided a test RPSL database for a few years. This database software (available for queries at rpslii.ripe.net) was written in perl and was set up so that the community can experiment with RPSL. It was around since the time of RPSL drafts. As the reimplementation project is approaching the end, we have set up two instances of the new software at reimp.ripe.net. One of them is a mirror and the other a test database. The purpose of the new test database is exactly the same as of the old perl version. Therefore we decided to shut down the old RPSL perl server at rpslii.ripe.net. This will happen on November 6, 2000. The data accumulated in that database will be lost. You can use the new RIP Test Database already. Updates to this database should be sent to <auto-rip(a)ripe.net> and you can query this database at reimp.ripe.net port 4343. We would be very pleased if you could test the new implementation and let us know your opinions. Please send your comments and bug reports to the <db-beta(a)ripe.net> mailing list. To subscribe to this list, send a message to <majordomo(a)ripe.net> with the line: subscribe db-beta in the body of your letter. This is a moderated mailing list so some delays in subscription are possible. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact <ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net>. Regards, Marek Bukowy ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration.

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Re: auto-dbm quirks
by Steven Bakker 21 Sep '00

21 Sep '00

>>>>> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, "MR" == Matthew Robinson wrote: MR> I have the "joy" of sitting behind an Exchange server and I can from MR> the 'Format' menu select plain text only which fixes this problem. I MR> suspect that there is more config on the server itself but as an MR> example this message should be plain text. It is, but the Exchange server itself apparently forces the multipart/ alternative, though only for clients that send their mail through the proprietary Exchange protocol. Straight SMTP to the server seems to work fine. In corporate-honcho type environments this may be dandy; keyboard monkeys are less than happy with it. Cheers, Steven (wishing nmh could do "virtual folders" on top of IMAP).

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auto-dbm quirks
by Steven Bakker 21 Sep '00

21 Sep '00

Hi folks, A few people have asked me to help them out with a nasty problem they're having. They are stuck behind a braindead ms-exchange server and corporate standards apparently prevent the use of SMTP, POP or IMAP. Hence, these people have to communicate using the Exchange protocol. Now, when the Exchange server has to send mail to the real^H^H^H^Houtside world, it will use a pesky "connector". And here's the catch: that connector has been configured to send mail as both plain text _and_ HTML, resulting in, you guessed it, one of those wonderful "multipart/alternative" hybrid freaks (can you tell I'm not a fan?). So, what's the big deal, you ask? These friends of mine are trying to send updates to the RIPE database, making do with the crummy mail software they have at their disposal. Unfortunately, the auto-dbm robot does not understand multipart/alternative, nor any other MIME encoding. In fact, as far as I can tell from its diagnostics, it completely ignores any Content-Type: header and simply treats the message as plain text. Now, I agree, the Exchange mail setup leaves a lot to be desired, but the mail it sends out _is_ standards compliant. The auto-dbm is the one that's non-compliant. There are two ways that I can see to fix this: 1. Look for a content-type:- header and INSIST on text/plain. This doesn't solve my friends' problems, but it would at least provide more intelligent diagnostics. 2. Do some MIME parsing, allowing both text/plain and multipart/alternative. In the case of multipart/alternative, INSIST on a text/plain part. Maybe even decode base64 or quoted-printable? Would be handy in case there are more crummy mail systems out there... I don't think the MIME parsing would be so difficult. Decoding base64 or quoted-printable shouldn't be that hard either. Is this something that can be done quickly, or at least put on a priority list? I foresee that in the near future more people will be forced to embrace the MS-Office dogma and suddenly find they cannot update their RIPE objects anymore. Cheers, Steven

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DB RPSL migration task force
by kieber＠ga-telecom.net 15 Sep '00

15 Sep '00

Re, at RIPE37 we have agreed to put a task force in place to prepare for migration to the new RPSL database, and I'd like to take the opportunity and solicit for members to this task force. Purpose of this task force should be finding the bugs in the new code before it is put to real work. Please review the migration plan at http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/reimp/new-transition-v3.ps We also want to raise awareness that the new database is actually in RPSL format, so there are some significant changes to RIPE-181 format. If you are using scripts to query or update the database its very likely you have to adapt those scripts and the task force would like to benefit from your experiences when playing with the new database and testing your tools. While RIPE NCC is using a test suite to test the new database the best test is having real users beat on it. Remember, you will have to live with the bugs the task force doesn't find. If you are interested in participating, please, get back to me and I'll have you added to the mailing list <reimp-mig-tf(a)ripe.net> -- Ulf Kieber email: kieber(a)ga-telecom.net Network Engineer voice: +49-69-299896-21 Global Access Telecommunications, Inc. fax : +49-69-299896-40 internet solutions for business www : www.ga-telecom.net

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