[acm-tf] suggestion

HI

Something for you to think about and feel free to grab me any time this
week if you want any more information.

I was talking to Tobias this morning about some design ideas I have had
over the last year for handling abuse POC information. While talking
another idea came to mind. It would be quite easy for us to rename the
"mnt-irt:" attribute to "abuse-c:". This would virtually implement the
whole requirement for an abuse POC, without affecting its use for
Incident Response Teams. It would still require authentication to add a
reference to the IRT.

It will be obvious to any user that this "new" attribute references a
contact as it ends with '-c'. An IRT object IS a contact object, similar
to PERSON and ROLE. It does not really matter that "abuse-c:" does not
reference a NIC Handle. As long as we have good documentation. At the
moment "mnt-irt:" does not reference a maintainer object which can be
confusing to users. The IRT already includes "abuse-mailbox:" and
"e-mail:". (We can change the optional/mandatory status of these
attributes.) We can reference it from INET(6)num and AUT-NUM. Of course
any name change may mean users have to change some of their software.

This could be done in a phased manner. First rename the attribute and
make it optional in the appropriate objects. Leave the existing
"abuse-mailbox:" for a while to allow users to move them to the more
appropriate place.

Then deprecate "abuse-mailbox:" from the other objects.

This implements the basic requirement of (moving towards) a single place
to store abuse POC in a way that is more intuitive. While that is being
rolled out and users start to adjust their data, the Task Force could
move on to consider the implications of yesterdays discussion about
hierarchies and what needs to be mandatory by syntax or required by
business rules and formalising a policy to wrap around the whole issue.

Hope the suggestion is helpful.

regards
Denis
Business Analyst
RIPE NCC Database Group