Hi Rodney These are very good questions. You are correct that there is a lot of legacy data that just sits there and may not be modified for years. Some of this will not be caught by any of these stages for a long time. The simple answer to your question 1 is that the RIPE NCC cannot decide on the time frame. That will have to come from the community. What we would like now is a consensus to move to stage 1. That will be a big step forward and require all new objects and any objects which are modified to be maintained. To go to stage 2 and 3 will have an impact on working practices. These involve maintaining referenced objects. So you may be prevented from making a change to an inetnum object because it references un-maintained person objects. In theory you should at least have a business relationship with these people. Otherwise why are they referenced from your data. But they may not be located physically in your office. So you will have to contact them and ask them to maintain their person object before you can modify the inetnum object. Or you just create a mntner, put it on the unreferenced person object and send the password to the person concerned. But these issues need time for people to think about and decide how they are going to handle the change. We can discuss this separately, on the mailing list or at RIPE 55, produce more statistics and then make a decision on a time frame to move to stages 2 and 3. For now lets focus on moving to stage 1. regards Denis RIPE NCC Rodney Tillotson wrote:
The proposal from Denis for moving towards assigning a mntner for all person, role and domain objects seems to me very clear, and entirely practicable to implement. Two questions:
1. How will RIPE NCC decide when to move to the next stage?
2. I think it is logically possible for objects in a stagnant part of the database to escape stages 1, 2 and 3 because they are rarely or never involved in update traffic. Have we any idea how large a collection of such objects will remain, and might there be a stage 4 during which action is taken on them?
I suspect both questions depend on some more statistics. Some of them will only become available as the transition goes on, and I do not know how to design them anyway.
Rodney Tillotson, JANET-CERT +44 1235 822 255.
Stage 1
* No new person, role or domain objects can be created without a "mnt-by:" attribute. * Any un-maintained person, role or domain object cannot be modified without adding a "mnt-by:" attribute. * Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person object, either directly or through a mntner with such references, will generate a warning message in the acknowledgement.
Stage 2
* Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person object, either directly or through a mntner with such references, will generate a warning message in the acknowledgement. * Any NEW reference to an un-maintained person object or to a mntner which has such references will generate an error message in the acknowledgement and the update will fail.
Stage 3
* Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person object, either directly or through a mntner with such references, will generate an error message in the acknowledgement and the update will fail.