On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 13:58, Niall O'Reilly wrote:
On 8 Apr 2004, at 10:50, Marco d'Itri wrote:
Clueless users do not use port 43 whois
Not directly. They buy some shrink-wrapped software to run on their WinXX box, which has a clue-free default configuration which they never review.
Which makes every proposal useless as in that case you are assuming the current toolwrites don't know about IRT objects. Then for sure they are not going to accept implementing the suddenly new abuse-mailbox and a seperate spam-mailbox etc on every object too. Notez bien that adding spam/abuse/attack/questions-mailboxes can also be added to the irt object. Or if you really want to make it general, why not start thinking of a contact object, but wait, we have that already it is called person/role... If you don't expect toolwriters to implement irt objects, because many people, or at least the couple on this list, don't want to add that simple object to their inet[6]num's then you should not expect everybody to start adding abuse+spam-mailbox and all the others to _all_ the objects they own. Unfortunatly the people making up/defining the documents can't force ever tool writer in this world to do their job correctly and implementing it as expected, especially with such a loose "protocol" as whois that is different in the 4 current regions of this world. ARIN registry is imho a mess compared to the RIPE/APNIC registries and I think one can bet that ARIN region folks think the same about the RIPE/APNIC registries. But you might educate those toolwriters to do so, either way, if that would be to let them check irt objects or let them check abuse-mailboxes that is a difficult and long process. Taking into account that most RIPE members are ISP's and that they don't want to have a big burden updating these objects I still think that the irt object is the way to go, though as seen from the comments, for instance Gert's about the mandatory encryption field, there could be done some work there. Also adding a 'spam/abuse-email' field to the irt might be handy. But how many toolwriters will suddenly move to this new standard, that will probably only be active in the RIPE registry while most toolwriters are from the ARIN or APNIC regions... Greets, Jeroen