This is the NCC's current thinking aout NIC handles. This is a quick dump, so If you have questions, please ask. Please comment! Daniel As decided at the last meeting we need to introduce unique handles in order to deal with ambiguities in the RIPE database. Especially accidental overwriting of persons will be a problem in the future with more than 10000 persons in the database now. After some discussion with the InterNIC we have concluded that a worldwide handle space is not realistic. In fact Australia has already started with their own space. Therefore we propose to start issuing RIPE handles as soon as technically feasible. Person handles will then be of the form XYZ123-INIC ABC457-RIPE .... Each physical person will eventually have one such handle only in order to facilitate database exchanges between NICs and database maintenance. RIPE handles will be assigned by sending in a person entry to auto-dbm with somethin like nic-hdl: assign which will cause the entry to be added with a new unique handle assigned. If there are other persons with the same name their entries will be returned as a check against multiple registrations. The NCC will *not* automatically assign handles to persons without handles on a "flag day". Local registries or the persons themselvews will have to do that. The reason for that is that all conflicts would need to be resolved beforehand and all persons notified of the change. This is too cumbersone, if not impossible. The NCC will flag possible conflicts present in the database today and help resolve them by notifying everyone involved and by assigning handles to all persons involved if necessary. In the future, handles will have to be used in the contact attributes (tech-c, admin-c, zone-c) in order to maintain unambiguous references. The recommended value for the contact attributes will be to list *both* name and handle in order to guard against typos in handles. Name only and handle only will also still be allowed. It might be necessary to disallow name only at some point when the majority of persons have a handle. Daniel
After some discussion with the InterNIC we have concluded that a worldwide handle space is not realistic. In fact Australia has already started with their own space.
As has Japan and I believe Korea. APNIC will most likely be allocating handles as well in the relatively near future.
Therefore we propose to start issuing RIPE handles as soon as technically feasible. Person handles will then be of the form
XYZ123-INIC ABC457-RIPE ....
While I agree that some method needs to be devised to avoid NIC handle collisions, I really don't like the implicit knowledge required in using names in this format. As an example, given DC001JP-JPNIC where would you go to find information about DC001JP if you didn't know JPNIC's whois server was at nic.ad.jp? As the number of registries that are allocating NIC handles increases, I feel adding another magic string isn't going to scale very well. Instead of using a magic string, why not simply put the domain name of the issuing registry or add a 'nic-hdl-source' field to the database?
Each physical person will eventually have one such handle only in order to facilitate database exchanges between NICs and database maintenance.
This is sort of off the subject, but the above sentence implies some strong global coordination between all NICs that issue NIC handles. What efforts are underway to involve NICs other than RIPE and InterNIC is this coordination? Thanks, -drc
David R Conrad <davidc@iij.ad.jp> writes:
This is sort of off the subject, but the above sentence implies some strong global coordination between all NICs that issue NIC handles. What efforts are underway to involve NICs other than RIPE and InterNIC is this coordination?
You are perfectly welcome to join the SWIP project. Actually I would consider representing the region in global database exchanges as an important role of the AP-NIC. We have defined an exchange format which I am sure Mark is willing to send you the latest revision of. If you are using a RIPE-like database structure, Marten can provide some tools to convert from/to the exchange format which you can adapt to your local database. Daniel
You are perfectly welcome to join the SWIP project. Actually I would consider representing the region in global database exchanges as an important role of the AP-NIC.
OK, sign us up... :-)
We have defined an exchange format which I am sure Mark is willing to send you the latest revision of. If you are using a RIPE-like database structure, Marten can provide some tools to convert from/to the exchange format which you can adapt to your local database.
I suspect we'll be able to contribute more fully in about a month. I would appreciate seeing the format and tools so I can have a chance to understand what is being passed around and how... Thanks, -drc
participants (2)
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Daniel Karrenberg -
David R Conrad