Dear Denis, I think I did not make my concerns clear enough. While I'm not thrilled by the current aspect of abuse-c (esp. content limitations w.r.t. IRT) it is the current policy and I accept to live with that. What I was trying to point out is that the current implementation does not implement the policy correctly as it does not *allow* to attach an abuse-c to an inet[6]num or aut-num. The indirection via the ORGANISATION is fine and efficient, but constraining. My use case is to set a specific abuse-c for one autnum and inetnum, which is not the same as the general abuse-c of the organisation. Maybe I could create a 'fake' ORG in order to link to that (probably it would not work in my case), but that means data duplication. Allowing to attach the abuse-c to whatever object would solve it more nicely. The DBs query logic should hardly be affected as it is simply a matter of returning the most specific abuse-c for the object.
In the RIPE Labs article https://labs.ripe.net/Members/kranjbar/implementation-details-of-policy-2011...
we pointed out that there are about 3.7 million Internet resource
objects in the RIPE Database. To add an "abuse-c:" attribute physically to each of these objects is unmanageable. Every users network is physically linked to their existing ORGANISATION object. Each user only needs to add one "abuse-c:" attribute in their ORGANISATION object and all their networks are covered.
Fully agree - it's probably the most efficient way to do it, but I see no reason for it to be the only one.
When any address is queried in the RIPE Database, the software will find the related "abuse-c:" reference and return this information as part of the query. By returning this information as a default with each query we have satisfied the policy requirement that the "abuse-c:" is "included in inetnum, inet6num and aut-num objects".
Well, the policy is met in so far that all queries do return an abuse-c. However if I, the resource holder, can not chose accurately which one should be displayed the aim of the policy (having a good abuse-c) is missed. (and to be honest, returning real data in the 'comment' section of the result gives me the shivers)
This implementation was presented to and discussed by the community on the Anti Abuse Working Group mailing list last year and Brian declared that a consensus had been reached in his email on December 5, on behalf of the co-chairs of the DB and AA Working Groups: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2012-December/001993.ht...
I've
read that at the time (maybe not carefully enough) but is was never clear to me that the reference via the ORG object was the only way - I understood it as a complement to the obvious possibility of adding the contact to any object.
The old RIPE Database reference manuals on the ripe.net web site still refer to the use of "abuse-mailbox:" attributes in other object types, but don't refer to "abuse-c:" at all. These attributes were never allowed to be added directly to the resource objects even in the legacy software. These old reference manuals are now out of date in many respects and should perhaps be clearly marked as archived documents.
By all means, please do so. There is nothing more confusion that slightly wrong documentation. Obviously an up to date documentation would be most welcome :) - at least a rough description of the objects with their fields (and the optional/mandatory nature of them). Best regards, Gilles -- Fondation RESTENA - DNS-LU 6, rue Coudenhove-Kalergi L-1359 Luxembourg tel: (+352) 424409 fax: (+352) 422473