From: MX%"bmanning@ISI.EDU" 25-SEP-1998 20:56:00.16 To: MX%"jabley@clear.co.nz" CC: MX%"db-wg@ripe.net" Subj: Re: NIC handle writeup From: bmanning@ISI.EDU Subject: Re: NIC handle writeup To: jabley@clear.co.nz (Joe Abley) Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 11:50:08 -0700 (PDT) CC: db-wg@ripe.net

"%" still has mail-related connotations though, although far less so than "@".

How about ":"? JA39:APNIC.NET doesn't look like an e-mail address or a DNS name. It does however look slightly remotely like a URL ;)

":" not only has URL significance, its also used w/ IPv6 in the address. IMHO a poor choice.

...

...

The only thing that really matters is if we can find the data and that it improves the current situation.

Thats two things. While desirable, the thing that I thought NIC handles did was to identify an entity that was responsible for some delegated level of responsibility.

This could be a host, person, role, or organization that accepted the responsibility over some delegated Internet resources (numbers & lables).

In ripe-181 the habit seems to have been to put contact fields (tech-c, admin-c) in every record where contact was appropriate, so contact details via NIC handles are immediately available. In other words, the drill down path of (for example) inetnum -> netname -> admin-c/tech-c isn't necessary since there are direct relationships inetnum -> admin-c and inetnum -> tech-c.

Has this changed significantly in RPSL, so that it is now important to have netname-type fields which have registry-internal and registry-external representation?

Or have I misunderstood the point you were making?

I think so. Back up a bit and take the 10,000m view. There are three classes of Internet intangibles that can be delegated, ASN's, Prefixes, Port numbers. (there are others, but these will do for this purpose) The recipiants of these delegations can be people (admin-c/tech-c), hosts (HST), organized groups (mntner & role accounts) I could make the case that the mntner:, admin-c:, tech-c:, mnt-by:, nic-hdl:, and the HST (C8-HST) are all, in a very real sense, NIC HANDLEs. They specify a relationship between Internet resources and those who are authorized to manage the delegation relationship.

...

So each of these things would have an unambigious lable that could be tied to an assignment of responsibility. Those lables should be consistant, regardless of where they are listed. They should also have some token that indicates the listing origin and may include a method for determining the level of trust on the listing.

Here, I expect that the handle: WM110 WM110-NSI WM110-ARIN all reflect me, first under the SRI-NIC, then Internic/NSI, then ARIN. I would hope the design of NIC-handles would allow migration of data between registries as well as allow for a deeply nested registration heirarchy. --bill -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return-Path: <owner-db-wg@ripe.net> Received: from ns2.univie.ac.at by access.cc.univie.ac.at (MX V4.1 VAX) with SMTP; Fri, 25 Sep 1998 20:55:55 MET-DST Received: from postman.ripe.net (postman.ripe.net [193.0.0.199]) by ns2.univie.ac.at (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA56164 for <woeber@cc.univie.ac.at>; Fri, 25 Sep 1998 20:55:54 +0200 Received: (qmail 918 invoked by alias); 25 Sep 1998 18:55:23 -0000 Delivered-To: lists-db-wg-out@lists.ripe.net Received: (qmail 916 invoked by uid 66); 25 Sep 1998 18:55:23 -0000 Posted-Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 11:50:08 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <199809251850.AA08047@zed.isi.edu> In-Reply-To: <19980925102909.B15327@clear.co.nz> from "Joe Abley" at Sep 25, 98 10:29:09 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-db-wg@ripe.net Precedence: bulk