On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 02:55 +0000, Francisco Guerreiro wrote:
Hi, I'm doing a statistic work on ripe.db for my University (Faculty of Science of the Lisbon University) and I downloaded ripe.db.inetnum (from the split files directory) so I can do statistics on several portuguese speaking countrys and Portugal itself. The ripe.db.inetnum suits my needs exactly but the admin-c: and tech-c: objects refer to person: objects which can't be found on ripe.db. I've googled a bit and found reference (back in 1993) of a split of ripe.db named ripe.db.person which probably had the additional information I need. Since I don't see that ripe.db.person anywhere on the ftp and the other .db files don't have person: objects, I was wondering if they were removed due to spam issues or something, since they're accessible through normal whois.ripe.net query's (which are bound to massive querying limits). Could someone shed some light into this matter?
Afaik they where removed because people used them for mass marketing (thus including spam). Nevertheless for statistical analysis you can most likely do without that information anyway. Usually the person's are role's and/or generic mailboxes anyways. If you want to see the amount of 'same persons' you can also compare the handles themselves... Greets, Jeroen