Draft Minutes of the DB WG meeting RIPE 36

Gentlefolk,

Here are the draft minutes to the DB WG meeting at RIPE 36, in Budapest. Due 
to a fit of spring-cleaning, I ended up deleting my notes of the first part of 
the meeting. Please feel free to fill any gaps and correct any errors.

best regards

Nigel



                          Draft Minutes for the
                       Database Working Group Meeting

                     RIPE-36, May 2000, Budapest, HU
                                 1. Draft



Thursday, May 18, 2000 at 10:30
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A.  Administrative stuff (Wilfried Woeber, chair)
        . scribe

		Nigel Titley volunteered to take the minutes

        . raw scribe notes distributed

		Wilfried had not had time to process the raw notes from
		RIPE 35, but these were circulated in lieu of full minutes.

        . help offered by
          - Nigel Titley,
          - Ulf Kieber

		Wilfried asked the WG if they were happy to accept the help
		offered by Nigel Titley and Ulf Kieber. Nigel would help with
		the PR and documentation side of the group, and Ulf will
		help to co-ordinate the working group. He received approval
		from WG on this issue.


B.  RIPE DB, operational update (Andrei Robachevsky, RIPE NCC)

	Andrei Robachevsky gave an operational update on the state
	of the RIPE DB. Amongst the many statistics that he presented it
	was noted the very large number of domain objects, mostly from the
	.de domain. It was explained that these objects would be shortly
	devolved to the DE-NIC whois server, and plans were currently being
	formulated to perform this move with minimum disruption to the
	RIPE community.

C.  DB Software Re-Implementation (Joao Damas, RIPE NCC)

	Joao Damas gave a short presentation on the progress of the DB
	Software re-implementation project.

D.  Report on Certification Authority activities (Paul Gampe, APNIC)

	Paul Gampe gave a very interesting presentation on the use of X509
	certificates for authentication when updating the APNIC database.
	The following points were noted:

	- Training at the next RIPE meeting might be useful, to provide
	a view of X509 vis-a-vis PGP. There appears to be a degree of 
	convergence between the two systems.

	- It was noted that it will be soon possible to sign X509 keys with
	PGP signatures and vice versa.

	- The main objection to using X509 is the cost of the commercial
	licenses. The first phase of the implementation will sort out
	licenses for users. Much cheaper (free) approaches are on their way.


E.  Activity Plan for next year!

	It was noted that input to the RIPE-NCC activity plan was needed
	before September. Suggestions received from the WG included

	- Use of X509 signature for authentication (as per APNIC)

	- Support for other character sets than ASCII. (Joao noted that the
	new code is 8-bit clean, but that there is problem wit the
	reproduction of character sets. The best he felt able to do was
	to track progress by other sources, and to keep the code clean).

	- Removal of further domain objects from the database. The problem
	being that existing applications must not be affected. It was suggested
	that the RIPE-NCC could offer help to other ccTLDs to set up their own 
	whois databases. It was suggested that we ask CENTR to produce a regular
	report and to try and get domain objects shifted out of the DB.
	[AP: Wilfried Woeber and Joao Damas]

F.	Input from other WGs

	- EIX-WG would like an object in the DB to describe IXs. It was also
	suggested that a peering contact in the aut-num object could be
	useful. There was some support for both these proposals and it was
	suggested that a formal request be made to the WG by email.

	- Routing WG. No further input had been received from the Routing WG
	re native multicast. It was felt that this would soon need looking
	at. The Routing WG needs to add an entry to the RPSL Draft.

G.	AOB

	- A suggestion (Joel Rowbottom) was made to use XML for registration 
	templates.  Suggestions as to how to do this would be gratefully 
	received.  
	[AP: Joao Damas to produce a presentation for the RIPE 37 meeting]

	- A suggestion to use a mail-to authentication scheme was received
	from Michael Battilana (IANA). The idea being that agreement to proceed
	with a modification would be obtained via a token and confirmation
	from a know mail mail address.
	It was agreed that this was not very easy to do as it is stateful and
	could lead to DOS attacks on the database.

    	- A brief update was given on CERT/IRT-related issues 
	(WW144/Jaques Schuurman). Ut was suggested that a pointer be added to
	inet-num object to point to the IRT role. Anyone interested in
	this work to contact the WG.


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