NIC Handles

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

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