Tuesday's questions

Hi!

  Some assorted questions today:

  Can you confirm a couple of impressions?  1) That if we are running
without guarded attributes, then there is no code to prevent anyone
from changing anything.  However, whenever someone does change
something that they probably aren't supposed to, a mail message gets
sent to the people responsible for that object so the damage can
probably be quickly repaired.  2) That when we run with guarded ASs,
this really doesn't matter much for nets since the only information
about nets that is used in routing is their ASs (and those *are*
guarded).

  I gather Marten would like us to hold off on using the guarded
attribute stuff until it is a bit more stable.  This would mean that
we'd put the first version into production unguarded.  Do we have
concensus that this is the right way to go for an initial deployment?

  What is the status of communities?  Laurent thought that they had
been announced as operational for Feb 7 (or some such).

  Is "rash" something you'd recommend we use?  Is the code available?

  We'd like to look at what would be required to add new attributes for
Merit purposes to our copy of the db.  Presumably we'd need to strip
these out of the db file that we transfer to you.  (Or would your code
just ignore new attributes in the .db file that it didn't know about?)
Could you suggest just a few sentences of issues we're likely to
encounter, code that you know offhand will require changing, things to
think about, etc?

  And a really vague one:  How much staff time do you spend "operating"
this?  (Or, more to the point, any estimates of what we need to budget
for operations?)  Even though this is a direct-user-input system, there
seems to be at least a minimal ongoing load to human process "auth:"
requests, set up new accounts, etc.  Are there routine issues that come
up with the nightly cleandb that end up requiring human involvement?
When two ASs claim the same net, do they tend to work that out
themselves (based on your automatic "conflict" email), or do you end up
participating in the discussion?  How much time does the RIPE NCC spend
helping new ASs or new net administrators learn the system and get
through problems?  How often do you have to go in as the administrators
and overwrite somebody's data?

  Do you recommend that Merit time be allocated for searching out
incomplete or incorrect information, and contacting people to
encourage them to do better at their registrations?  (e.g. how much
time do you spend doing that?  Should that be an operational responsibility
of a "remote RIPE" site?)

  (And all of those activities, I presume, are in addition to figuring
out what next months' features ought to be, building concensus with the
community, actually coding and testing, answering long-winded questions
for friends across the pond, etc.  :-) )

  Thanks!

-Dale



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