RIPE 50

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Database Working Group Minutes from RIPE 50
RIPE Meeting 50 in Stockholm
Version 2
Thursday 5th May 2005 - 9h00 - 10h30
Scribe: Flora Robin

Agenda:

A. Administrative Matters

* scribe
* list of participants
* agenda
* minutes
* "remote participation" coordination (if needed)

B. DB Update (Shane Kerr, RIPE NCC)

C. Changes in the DB for "abuse" stuff (Shane Kerr, RIPE NCC)

D. Country attribute: status/value (Wilfried Woeber)

Y. Input from other WGs
- "whois2005" from Address Policy?

Z. AOB


---------------------------


A. Administrative Matters

Scribe: Flora Robin (RIPE NCC)

Jabber scribe: Oleg Muravskiy (RIPE NCC)

Minutes from the previous WG session approved.


Outstanding Actions


46.5 WW Coordinate with RIPE NCC to prepare a document
summarizing basic assumptions about the use of the database.
[Should be checked with the Address Policy WG and RIPE NCC, Ongoing]

47.3 RIPE NCC Write a document properly documenting the use of the
IRT object for reporting abuse.
[Ongoing]


48.2 Shane Kerr To publish the CRISP/Joint-Whois requirements on the DB WG list.
[Complete]

48.6 RIPE NCC To change DB behaviour to return IRT object
[Complete]

48.7 RIPE NCC To make the PGP attribute optional on the IRT object
[Complete]

49.1 RIPE NCC To convey new database abuse contact
Anti-Spam WG behaviour to the anti-spam tool writing community
[RIPE-NCC has contacted over 100 people, Complete]

49.2 RIPE NCC Give updates about the number of abuse records
in the database to the Working Group.
[Ongoing]

49.3 RIPE NCC To produce a document detailing the programme for
introducing the abuse contact changes.
[Complete]

49.4 RIPE NCC To implement the abuse-email: attribute in the irt,
person and role objects.
[Complete]


---------------------------

B. DB Update

Presented by : Shane Kerr, RIPE NCC

Peter Koch was pretty happy about the new poem object but was concerned about
intellectual property.

Wilfred wondered about the status of CRISP and why aren't the RIR happy about the requirements?
Shane: IETF wants the requirement document to be done before the
protocol is redesigned,
rather than the other way around. This would allow to choose between different possibilities.
Currently, the requirements are done for the address lookup part, but not much more has been done.
The protocol is as well almost complete.
Wilfried: Who is involved from the RIRs?
George Michael from APNIC, and ARIN and RIPE NCC


Wilfred: Could something be done to make it easy for a human being to get email
addresses out of the database but not for scripts?
Peter Koch suggests to fake the e-mail address so that it can not be used automatically,
but this won't probably work.
Shane: The recent changes to abuse should hopefully reduce this problem as you don't
get the changed lines anymore when you only query for an IP address.


---------------------------

C. Changes in the DB for "abuse" stuff (RIPE NCC) [~15 min]

Presented by : Shane Kerr, RIPE NCC

Q: Did the hint string (something that would look like an email address)
got implemented?
A: not for now

Q: Shall we let the last changed line?
A: There has been lots of proposals about how to change the 'changed' attribute, but it's not
so easy.
Q: What about allowing nic-handles?

Q: Using -r flag with an IP address, you only get inetnum objects and no role or maintainer, so there
is no abuse-mailbox. Shall we add abuse-mailbox to inetnum and inet6num?
A: yes, that's a good idea

Q: What about using -c for getting abuse info?
A: But in this case, in which order?

Q: By now, when people are trying to do updates, they copy and paste the output returned by whois.
But this output is now filtered, so they remove all the changed lines by mistake.
Would it be usefull to have a remark attribute to notify them?
A: They could use webupdates or use the specific flag for getting everything

Q: Are there any statistics about how it goes?
A: not yet but this happened

C: People that are using -r flags know what they are doing, so this is not an argument to
put this 'abuse-mailbox' attribute on inetnum objects.


---------------------------

C. Country attribute: status/value

Presented by : Wilfried Woeber

This was an open discussion to take decisions.

The country attribute is mandatory for inetnum and inet6num objects,
but what does it mean exactly? Postal address of the registry,
countries
where it is implemented or where the IP addresses are used... ?

As someone with a very strong opinion is not here so we should bring that to the mailing list.
[AP 50.1][WW]

Q: Who uses this attributes?
Organisations like Google. So would/should we mind to annoy them?
Shall we break a big block and see what will happen.

C: Someone tried to contact google concerning this issue but they didn't came back to him.

Q: Shall we document how to not to use the country code?
A: The changed line was documented, but this hasn't been helpfull.

Maybe the country attribute shouldn't be used for locating services.

If the country attribute is mandatory, that means that we force them to put it.
So it should be optional, so that they can choose to fill it in or not.

This information is already in the org object, so it should be optional.


Proposal: make it optional and multiple

Shane Kerr: We had a consensus for making it optional,
but the Address Policy WG was completly against.

Show hands: one person against the proposal (no reason), everybody else agrees.


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Y. Input from other WGs

No input as this is the first WG.


Z. AOB

No other business.