"Export dbm" program

On Tue, 13 Dec 1994 17:03:32 -0500  "Dale S. Johnson" wrote:
>   It is useful to make bulk data available to general users on the
> Internet.  Engineers use this for sanity checks against their own
> config files, for ad-hoc analysis (e.g. "How many aggregates are
> there?"), etc.  The PRDB supports this through a variety of reports,
> including "net-comp.now" (the most popular) and "nets.unl.now" (a dump
> of all fields relating to networks in a machine-parsable format).  The
> RIPE system supports this same function by making the *.db files
> available for anonymous ftp.  If you want to (for instance) count the
> number of A's B's and C's in the world, you ftp their database and run
> you script on your machine.  There is a sentence somewhere in the RIPE
> documents that says they don't do other reports because reports are so
> easy to generate off their .db dump.  This dump of data is a basic
> end-user deliverable of the system, quite independent of anything that
> the members of the IRR need to have in place to achieve their own
> synchronization.  It is this function that I am suggesting we make
> trivially up-to-date where possible by putting the actual db file up
> for distribution (rather than a strobed copy of it).  [Actually, the RA
> has a technical difficulty with this:  for security reasons, we do not
> want to run anonymous ftp or NFS mounts on the production machine, so
> the actual production .db file is not on-line to the ftp machine.  But
> maybe we can work something else out;  perhaps kerberos NFS].

Dale,

I don't see the point of this. People either:
- want the bulk data for statistical data (count A's, B's, C's)
  In this case a 24-hour stale file should not be a problem
- want authoritive data for object xyz to use for configuration
  & sanity checking. In this case the whois interface is a much
  better choice as it provides instant authoritive answers
  (a copy obtained by FTP would be stale the moment the FTP
  finishes; whether it's 5 minutes stale or 24 hours stale
  doesn't matter)

We provide a copy of our database every night after cleanup,
which is sufficient for the first category.

As far as I know, we never received a request for the data as you suggest.
Have you?

Cheers,

Geert Jan




-------- Logged at  Wed Dec 14 12:39:41 MET 1994  ---------