NIC handle writeup

Joe,

On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 09:40:21PM +1200, Joe Abley wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 09:24:32AM +0000, David Kessens wrote:
> > 
> > Example
> > 
> >    example: KH1 at ARIN.NET
> > 
> >    KH1 is local identifier ARIN.NET is global registry identifier (last
> >    part of domain name can possibly be omitted)
> 
> I would suggest that KH1 at ARIN is less confusing than KH1 at ARIN.NET, unless
> e-mail to kh1 at arin.net will actually be forwarded to the appropriate real
> e-mail address of kh1. I presume this will not be the case, since the
> registries are not in the business of forwarding mail.

This could actually turn out to be an advantage if there are
connectivity problems. You at least have two paths to the party that
you want to reach, but spammers might like this feature too ...
Anyways, there are other ways to get the same result (and this is not
part of the problem that we try to solve so we better spend our time
to discuss the NIC handle issue itself).
 
> Using the whole domain name would help scripts identify appropriate
> resources for queries (e.g. whois.ARIN.NET in this example), but since
> we seem to be moving towards every registry mirroring every other registry,
> this seems less important.
> 
> Either way, it seems important to standardise on one or the other.

I agree. It really doesn't matter that much which one is choosen, as
long we finally choose one ;-).

The only issue that I have with the abbreviated one is that the
algorithm to find the organization that issued the identifier gets a
bit more complicated/less obvious:

- 1) domain=identifier when a . is present
  2) no . in identifier means, add .net
  3) except, when it is a TLD (ambiguities are possible with 2)

or

- always add .net 
  
  makes the namespace flatter, though you can still use subdomains,
  ties you in with one particular tld 
  tld 'es' might not have 'es.net'

or

- add registries.int

  needs global coordination and judgements of independent party which
  is not desired (in my opinion)

(do you have a better one ?!?)

> The InterNIC assigned me JA39 a long time ago, and I continue to use it
> in the APNIC registry. What should this be now? JA39 at APNIC.NET?
> JA39 at INTERNIC.NET?

Depends were it is stored (or will be stored in the future). If it's
in both databases, both would be fine. Note that we would like a
perfect solution, but there are too many inconsistencies to keep the
solution simple *and* covering all situations. The only thing that
really matters is if we can find the data and that it improves the
current situation.

> I think these migration issues deserve further treatment.

Agreed. Please send me a paragraph ;-),

David K.
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