[db-wg] Proposal - Maintaining person, role and domain objects

Hi Rodney

These are very good questions. You are correct that there is a lot of
legacy data that just sits there and may not be modified for years. Some
of this will not be caught by any of these stages for a long time.

The simple answer to your question 1 is that the RIPE NCC cannot decide
on the time frame. That will have to come from the community.

What we would like now is a consensus to move to stage 1. That will be a
big step forward and require all new objects and any objects which are
modified to be maintained.

To go to stage 2 and 3 will have an impact on working practices. These
involve maintaining referenced objects. So you may be prevented from
making a change to an inetnum object because it references un-maintained
person objects. In theory you should at least have a business
relationship with these people. Otherwise why are they referenced from
your data. But they may not be located physically in your office. So you
will have to contact them and ask them to maintain their person object
before you can modify the inetnum object. Or you just create a mntner,
put it on the unreferenced person object and send the password to the
person concerned.

But these issues need time for people to think about and decide how they
are going to handle the change. We can discuss this separately, on the
mailing list or at RIPE 55, produce more statistics and then make a
decision on a time frame to move to stages 2 and 3.

For now lets focus on moving to stage 1.

regards
Denis
RIPE NCC

Rodney Tillotson wrote:
> The proposal from Denis for moving towards assigning a mntner for all
> person, role and domain objects seems to me very clear, and entirely
> practicable to implement. Two questions:
>
>
> 1. How will RIPE NCC decide when to move to the next stage?
>
> 2. I think it is logically possible for objects in a stagnant part of
> the database to escape stages 1, 2 and 3 because they are rarely or
> never involved in update traffic.
> Have we any idea how large a collection of such objects will remain,
> and might there be a stage 4 during which action is taken on them?
>
>
> I suspect both questions depend on some more statistics. Some of them
> will only become available as the transition goes on, and I do not
> know how to design them anyway.
>
> Rodney Tillotson, JANET-CERT
> +44 1235 822 255.
>
>
> >> Stage 1
> >>
> >>   * No new person, role or domain objects can be created without a
> >>     "mnt-by:" attribute.
> >>   * Any un-maintained person, role or domain object cannot be
> >>     modified without adding a "mnt-by:" attribute.
> >>   * Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person
> >>     object, either directly or through a mntner with such
> >>     references, will generate a warning message in the
> >>     acknowledgement.
>
> >> Stage 2
> >>
> >>   * Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person
> >>     object, either directly or through a mntner with such
> >>     references, will generate a warning message in the
> >>     acknowledgement.
> >>   * Any NEW reference to an un-maintained person object or to a
> >>     mntner which has such references will generate an error message
> >>     in the acknowledgement and the update will fail.
>
> >> Stage 3
> >>
> >>   * Any update where objects reference an un-maintained person
> >>     object, either directly or through a mntner with such
> >>     references, will generate an error message in the
> >>     acknowledgement and the update will fail.
>