Hello all and happy new year!

To answer Wilfried's first question, in almost all cases we check for
the values to be within defined (or logical) ranges. In the new RIPE
Database update software we have centralised definitions for these kind
of values and other syntax check and business rules. Now it is very easy
to either add/remove or adjust new checks.

In general, missing syntax checks are considered software bugs and will
be fixed as soon as they are discovered by us or reported by our users.

Your second question is aimed at the community and we are also
interested to know what community thinks the rules should be. At the
moment for the RIPE Database business rule checks we have a mix of both
scenarios:

- The Routing Registry part of RIPE Database is more liberal and is
mainly bound to syntax checks (e.g. ROUTE(6) objects, set objects and
AUT-NUM's routing attributes).

- The Resource Registry part -- mainly to enforce policies -- has many
business rules and checks embedded into it. Two examples are name server
provisioning checks for domain objects which is far beyond checking the
"nserver:" attribute syntax and INET(6)NUM "status:" attribute checks.

Kind regards,
Kaveh

---
Kaveh Ranjbar,
RIPE NCC Database Group Manager

On Jan 2, 2013, at 2:24 PM, Wilfried Woeber <Woeber@CC.UniVie.ac.at> wrote:

Q to the DB Team: is the software doing any checks against numeric values
as numbers or is the data treated/stored exclusively as text?

As a sort of more general sideline,
there may be other limits or boundary conditions, and I am wondering where
the proper place is to "enforce" those. I know about the 'be rigorous about
what you transmit and liberal (and careful) in what you accept'.
But I wonder whether that would not apply to tools just equally?