NIC Handles

Daniel,

> This is the NCC's current thinking aout NIC handles.
> This is a quick dump, so If you have questions, please ask.
> Please comment!

My 2 cents...

> As decided at the last meeting we need to introduce unique handles in
> order to deal with ambiguities in the RIPE database.  Especially
> accidental overwriting of persons will be a problem in the future with
> more than 10000 persons in the database now. 
> 
> After some discussion with the InterNIC we have concluded that a
> worldwide handle space is not realistic.  In fact Australia has already
> started with their own space. 
> 
> Therefore we propose to start issuing RIPE handles as soon as
> technically feasible.  Person handles will then be of the form
> 
> 	XYZ123-INIC
> 	ABC457-RIPE
> 	....
> 
> Each physical person will eventually have one such handle only in order
> to facilitate database exchanges between NICs and database maintenance. 
> 
> RIPE handles will be assigned by sending in a person entry to auto-dbm
> with somethin like
> 
> 	nic-hdl: assign
> 
> which will cause the entry to be added with a new unique handle
> assigned.  If there are other persons with the same name their entries
> will be returned as a check against multiple registrations. 
> 
> The NCC will *not* automatically assign handles to persons without
> handles on a "flag day".  Local registries or the persons themselvews
> will have to do that.  The reason for that is that all conflicts would
> need to be resolved beforehand and all persons notified of the change. 
> This is too cumbersone, if not impossible. 
> 
> The NCC will flag possible conflicts present in the database today and
> help resolve them by notifying everyone involved and by assigning
> handles to all persons involved if necessary. 
> 
> In the future, handles will have to be used in the contact attributes
> (tech-c, admin-c, zone-c) in order to maintain unambiguous references. 
> The recommended value for the contact attributes will be to list *both*
> name and handle in order to guard against typos in handles.  Name only
> and handle only will also still be allowed.  It might be necessary to
> disallow name only at some point when the majority of persons have a
> handle. 

A still open question is what to do with people residing in Europe having
a InterNIC handle already. You surely want these people to have a RIPE
handle as well, I presume. This, however, would mean that such a person
has two handles, which is confusing.

Possible solutions?:
- flag these people and assign them a RIPE handle and reject the INIC
  handle.
- leave the INIC handle as is, and use this inside the RIPE Data Base.
- Live with the confusion of more than one handle per person.

A totally different thing is that there are people in the data base more
than once. I guess this is really hard to flag automatically, but this
needs to be sorted out as well.

__
 
Erik-Jan.