Modifying references to contact info in the RIPE DB

[Joao Luis Silva Damas <]

Dear all,

the Database consistency project has been going forward in its goals since 
RIPE 33
(eg. addition of nic handles to all objects without one.)

Statistics and reports about the "status" of the database can be seen at 
http://www.ripe.net/db/state/. We will keep adding information to these pages 
as the project progresses.

We are now at the point where we would like to tackle the issue of references 
by name in the admin-c, tech-c and zone-c.

As a next step, we would like to have references by nic handles (which are 
unique) instead of references by name (which can be non -unique).

At this point, we would like to automatically go through all the references by 
name which can uniquely be assigned to a person or role object and substitute 
them by references to their nic handles.

This will prevent these references from becoming non-unqiue in the future.

Later we will go through the process of fixing the non-unique references left 
in the database. This process requires user intervention since we can't decide 
who "owns" a particular set of resources.
For this later stage, we will be preparing reports that we will send to all 
maintainers for whom we detect objects with inconsistencies and try to get 
them fixed. Information about this part will be sent to the lists in a few 
weeks.

We would like to do this after as much as possible has been done by automatic 
means to correct inconsistencies so that human effort is reduced to a minimum.

If there are any concerns regarding this move, please make them known before 
next Friday (June 25th).

Looking forward to your comments,

Joao Damas
Database Group
RIPE NCC