[27509] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: whois broke again?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Mon Feb 21 18:41:47 2000
Message-ID: <38B1B352.AE45264F@greendragon.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 16:51:28 -0500
From: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
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Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> On Mon, 21 February 2000, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
> > Yes there are interesting scoping issues. Yes there are concerns wrt
> > evil people and tolerent applications. But this tactic clearly puts the
> > onus on the people in control of the useage, not some centralized repository.
>
> That sounds great, except the time when WHOIS is most important is when
> the contact has totally screwed up their site and can't be reached by any
> in-band network. The nice thing about WHOIS is it tends to be out-of-band
> with respect to most screw-ups. The notable exception is when NSI screws-up.
>
Not exactly out-of-band, as it requires the network to be up to special
servers, which are notoriously single points of failure.
Meanwhile, Bill's proposal _is_ out-of-band to the addressed destination,
so long as they have an off-site DNS secondary.
I like Bill's proposal a lot, except that the speed of propagation is
kinda slow. Look how fast DNSsec has been deployed :-(
> The open question is why can RIPE get people to put good data in their database,
> and NSI can't manage to keep the little correct data they have uncorrupted?
Which is one of the reasons that I proposed the Operators version of
OpenWhois, as these will be the ones we've needed to use, and thus
will be kept more up-to-date. (At least we can pressure the smaller
set of miscreants directly.) Unlike NSI, we'd have an incentive
to keep the data up-to-date, as our focus is keeping the network
going, rather than raking in one time charges.
That's why I like a central repository. Verification is also in one
place. So, I think we need both -- whois and DNS contacts.
I expect that RIPE also exerts some leverage, but have never asked....
Or many Europeans are just better behaved than Yankees?
WSimpson@UMich.edu
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