Hi Alex, many thanks for your detailed response. On 03/08/2012 10:30, Alex Band wrote:
First, there is the matter of the reg-id itself. The reg-id is an identifier that the RIPE NCC uses internally for maintaining records in the Registry. The fact that it is referenced in the alloclist file is essentially an anomaly, which is the reason it doesn't appear in any other place such as the RIPE Database.
It appears and is used in a variety of other places, e.g. the LIR index listing, board related stuff (voting, etc), meeting registration, lirportal, and so forth.
However, there actually is a public identifier which has a one-to-one mapping to an LIR. This is the LIR's org-id, such as "ORG-INEX1-RIPE" and "ORG-SA17-RIPE", as referenced here:
https://apps.db.ripe.net/whois/lookup/ripe/organisation/ORG-INEX1-RIPE.html https://apps.db.ripe.net/whois/lookup/ripe/organisation/ORG-SA17-RIPE.html
org-ids certainly exist as an entity in the RIPEDB. However, there is not a 1:1 mapping to LIRs. It's certainly true that each LIR is assigned a unique org-id, but not every org-id is associated with a LIR. e.g. ORG-INEX1-RIPE refers to INEX, but INEX is not a LIR.
The information associated with this identifier is directly maintainable by the member from the LIR Portal, and should be preferred for public records. In short, if we are going to maintain an exhaustive list of all resources associated with an LIR, it should reference the org-id of the LIR and not the reg-id.
There are certainly some advantages associated with this idea, although there is information noted in the regid listing which is not listed in the org-id object. A more complete database view would include both a resource id -> orgid and lirinfo -> orgid mapping.
Secondly, there is the addition of all resource information to the existing allocations list in bulk format. The request that you have has actually been brought up and discussed before on several occasions, even at the RIPE 63 in Vienna. The reason why it never came to an implementation is because of the the privacy issues that were raised, specifically about exposing commercial relationships such as revealing the sponsoring LIR for a particular End User resource.
It's certainly been discussed before without any particular conclusion, but I didn't gather from the various WG discussions - either at RIPE meetings or on the mailing lists - that it stalled due to privacy concerns. Do you have a reference for this? Nick