Hi Marco,
IMHO you can define two groups of database users:
- the relatively small group of techies who are updating the database and/or know how to use it and how to find specific information like incident response teams. - The large group of users who hardly know what the database is and why it is there and only want to get one piece of information: Where can I complain about this spam I got.
For the first group everything is in place and working. As from my personal experience the second group doesn't understand how things work and how to read the information returned on a query and to be more specific admin-c, tech-c and especially changed attributes are not by default the best address to send complaints to as we already mentioned in the remarks section which got returned on the same query.
Reading the remarks section which is used by most people to list abuse information is easy for the human reader, although I have came accross webinterfaces who didn't like the <address> notation most people use. But it's hard for a programmer to 'read' as it is not fixed format.
Introducing the abuse: attribute as a single syntactically valid[1] email address on inetnum objects or the first level of objects it refers to makes it simple in the way that:
whois ip-address | grep abuse:
Will always result in a valid email address to send the complaint, without the need to walk to a tree of objects referring to each other and search for remarks fields pointing to the abuse desk or just collecting everything which includes an '@' and not even using uniq on them.
Take it from the point of the non-professional "I'm sure this is easy to write in perl/php/shell/cobol/whatever" programmer who needs to query and parse the ripe database.
MarcoH
I very much agree with your description of the 2 groups using the whois database. It is very interesting that we got this big database running and lots of tech people taking the time to update it, but it actually misses the primary reason for its existence! As I have always understood the whois database, its a system where everybody can find the person responsible for a specific IP address in case they have a complaint about this IP address. I also think that in order for abuse addresses to work successfully in the system it has to be as easy as you described, with a grep command. If that only works sometimes, some IP addresses are registered another way, then its not worth much.. To make sure something which is implemented also works its very important that its simple, eventhough most LIRs have technical people who can figure out how to use Ripe systems it does not make sense if a very sofisticated system is implemented which has advanced features which is fully used by only about half the LIRs, then why should the rest bother with it? Med venlig hilsen/Best regards Christian Rasmussen Hosting manager, jay.net a/s Smedeland 32, 2600 Glostrup, Denmark Email: noc@jay.net Personal email: chr@corp.jay.net Tlf./Phone: +45 3336 6300, Fax: +45 3336 6301 Produkter / Products: http://hosting.jay.net