[db-wg] Adequate contact information in the RIPE database must be enforced (was: NCC#2008090071 Unreachable Italian Host)

Thor,

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 11:00 +0300, Thor Kottelin wrote:
> It is intolerable that important and urgent security-related communications
> repeatedly fail due to a lack of adequate contact information.

I don't think it is intolerable (after all it has been this way for more
than 15 years now), but it would be nice for someone to do the work
necessary on an on-going basis to update contact information.


There are a couple of problems with this though:

1. It costs money, both on the side of the NCC and the contact.
2. There is no enforcement mechanism.

I would be happy for the NCC to spend money on this, but I don't
represent an LIR. ;)


For resources allocated or assigned to an LIR, this should be pretty
straightforward. Every LIR pays a fee each year, after all!

For other resources (PI blocks and AS numbers) it is more difficult,
since there is no established relationship with anyone(*). But, it is
still possible to look at the routing tables and contact peers to figure
this out, with some work.


This is probably more something for the services working group.

(*) There is a proposal to fix this problem:
      http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2007-01.html
    But there is a lot of resistance. You can view the various threads 
    on the address policy working group for a sense of the discussion.

--
Shane