[db-wg] cmd line asused and webasused

Hi Alex,

On 17/01/2012 14:25, Alex Band wrote:
> Thanks for bringing up asused. It is a tool that was written and
> maintained by the RIPE NCC many years ago and later handed to the open
> source community, where it can be found in packages such as Debian: 
> http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/asused.html
> 
> This, along with the fact that is was written in a very platform
> specific manner, is the reason why the tool is no longer actively
> developed and supported by the RIPE NCC. On the other hand, we have
> always kept the existence of asused in mind, which means that we would
> never intentionally change anything to our (whois) configuration that
> would break asused. I want to assure you that we'll try to fix any issue
> that you may have on a best effort basis.

Problem is, we don't yet have a replacement command-line tool for dealing
with quick-n-easy LIR resource usage summarisation.  This has meant that
the people who depended on this tool were left hanging for the last 8
years, because the code slowly rotted as interfaces subtly changed over
time.  This is not a criticism of changing the DB interface or anything,
btw - progress needs to happen.

In terms of being platform specific, it was limited to any platform which
could run perl - perhaps with minor modifications.  There are lots of
complaints that people make about perl, (some legitimate) but platform
portability is not one of them.

OTOH, webasused can be very slow.  E.g. I submitted a request for a LIR at
15:28 GMT today, and got a reply at 15:39.  This makes it unusable for a
typical workflow process (e.g. run asused, check output against internal
records, submit a couple of updates, run asused again, check again, repeat
until satisfied).

The web version is also unauthenticated which means that it's open to third
parties submitting requests for arbitrary LIRs.  And it doesn't support
ipv6, which means that it's still difficult to do resource reconciliation
for v6 assignments.

I'll admit that not everyone likes command line tools, but for those of us
who continue to us asused, it's a real pity that it wasn't maintained and
further developed to support ipv6.

Nick