Software change requests for Ripe V3 code

[George Michaelson ggm@localhost]

I spoke to Joao and Andrei today about some changes APNIC would like
to see in the ripe V3 code, and we all agreed that in the spirit of
code management in an open process, they should be proposed here for
wider community review.

So I would like to submit the following three proposals for changes to the
current code.


	1) add  country:     [optional]   [single]     [ ]
	   to objects in RPSL schema

	2) add some -k behaviours to permit generation of DNS zones

	3) add a cross-correlation attribute to objects


1) add  country:     [optional]   [single]     [ ] to objects in RPSL schema

APNIC currently uses R181 v2 perl to serve whois. We have existing data which
is tagged by countrycode. We would like to maintain this information in an RPSL
schema.

We are manually adding the schema changes to the v3 code, but we feel it would
serve wider convergeance of schema if this was in the global model. 



2) add some -k behaviours to permit generation of DNS zones

APNIC depends on locally developed code which reads the v2 .db files to
generate a radix tree view of domain  objects which are of the form

	domain: z.y.x.in-addr.arpa
	nserver: foo.bar.baz
	nserver: fu.bar

this radix tree is then walked in /8 /16 and /24 forward order so
we can make zonefiles for the byte aligned boundaries, and the
matching bind named.conf inputs.

We would like to be able to do this via a single pass, directly from the
V3 server. WE have already demonstrated we can emit the sorted list of
the domain objects, and so a two pass process can be done, but it will have
a far higher query load. So, we think this proposal will generate outcomes
faster, and for less load on the server.

We also think that this feature would be useful for people managing other
DNS zones.



3) add a cross-correlation attribute to objects

APNIC is investigating higher-level services for its membership based
on correlating data held across multiple servers. TO do this, we need
a cross-correlation key. We have also noticed that the discrete objects
held by an organization in whois do not have any binding cross-reference
except in a limited sense between nic-hdl and objects, or maintainer refs.

While we think we can mimic this behaviour by overloading mnt-by: we would
perfer this is implemented as a new attribute and object, so there is
no risk of side effects (eg mnt-by implies rights to change, and we don't
want to do that in this context)


comments welcome!

cheers
	-George
--
George Michaelson       |  APNIC
Email: ggm@localhost    |  PO Box 2131 Milton QLD 4064
Phone: +61 7 3367 0490  |  Australia
  Fax: +61 7 3367 0482  |  http://www.apnic.net