Hi Joe, At the last ripe meeting it was agreed to track object history including UTC time zone, although I'm not entirely clear what this means. Presumebly it means that the changed field will be stamped automatically by the db software with utc time and the from line of the email. I think another holdup is the issue of the millenium approaching. The current date format (ie, YYMMDD) will be insufficient for those future dates. And so this problem must be fixed too. I would think that YYYYMMDD is an obvious solution. The db software will be converted from ripe181 to rpsl over the coming 6 months. Maybe when the db's are officially changed to rpsl we can update the objects from YYMMDD --> YYYYMMDD format. --Gerald ps Yes, this is exactly the correct forum to bring this up. Joe Abley writes:

Apologies if this is the wrong forum to bring this up...

It would appear that current implementations of the e-mail gateway which lets you update RR records impose a restriction on the date field to prevent people from entering dates that appear to be in the future - records like that are returned with an error.

This is a bit of a pain for people in NZ and Australia, who are typically 18-20 hours ahead of RR machines located in the US, and are hence generally the date is a day ahead. It means that every time we make an update to an RR, we have to date the modification with the previous day's date.

Now this isn't a really serious problem or anything, but it is annoying. Could the RRDB not store date and time records in (say) UTC, and convert local times supplied with timezones before sanity-checking dates that appear to be in the future?

Joe -- Joe Abley <jabley@clear.co.nz> CLEAR Communications Ltd Systems Engineer, ISD http://www.clear.co.nz/

-- Gerald A. Winters gerald@merit.edu Merit Network, Inc. (313) 747-3522 (office) 4251 Plymouth Road, Suite C. (313) 747-3745 (fax) Ann Arbor, MI 48105-2785

It would appear that current implementations of the e-mail gateway which lets you update RR records impose a restriction on the date field to prevent people from entering dates that appear to be in the future - records like that are returned with an error.

This is a bit of a pain for people in NZ and Australia, who are typically 18-20 hours ahead of RR machines located in the US, and are hence generally the date is a day ahead. It means that every time we make an update to an RR, we have to date the modification with the previous day's date.

Now this isn't a really serious problem or anything, but it is annoying. Could the RRDB not store date and time records in (say) UTC, and convert local times supplied with timezones before sanity-checking dates that appear to be in the future?

This sounds like a bug to me. I propose checking the given date against tomorrow's date (local time). This should fix the problem you are experiencing and still catch silly errors. Comments? New records and updates can use dates of the form YYYYMMDD or YYMMDD. Existing records have not been changed. We should probably disallow the YYMMDD form and convert the existing dates to the new form at some point. RPSL specifies the YYYYMMDD form for the changed: attrib (and is vague about the new withdrawn: attrib but gives a 8 digit example). Chris.