Distributed RIPE??

Hi--

  Bill Manning has done some playing with MERITRR.  As near as I can tell,
most of the problems he has encountered have been his own (misspelling
"auto-dbm", not seeing files that were there).  We haven't been totally
ready for him (e.g. it took several hours to be able to answer him about
the status of AS-macros, and it took me several hours to find out (from
Rick) what I was doing wrong in running "cleandb").

  He has also been staying up nights installing and playing with Mark 
Kosters' "rwhois".  Bill has made comments to both Jessica and me about
"this may make the Merit Routing Registry obsolete":  e.g., if he can
enter data on his own machine that will then work with prtraceroute
(Kosters set up a demo of doing this).

  Here are my initial reactions to this:

    1) The RIPE software has always been intended to evolve to a truly
       distributed configuration.  (Right?)  What Bill is suggesting is
       compatible with our joint intended direction.

       As I understand it, though, RIPE has no cycles to pursue this
       goal at the moment.  Is this correct?

    2) Even if the DB becomes totally distributed like this, there still
       needs to be software as part of that distribution to do local
       data entry, syntax checking, etc.  We could (jointly) supply that.

    3) Even under rwhois, the pr* tools need to be enhanced to support
       such distributed data.

    4) Jessica and I talked about doing the "Aggregate Registry" this way;
       I think that registry is probably the least suitable project for
       rwhois, since rwhois needs a delegation chain (like for IP addresses)
       and there isn't such a thing for aggregates.

rwhois seems to have a fair bit to offer.  We might roll Bill's ideas into
our upcoming discussions (when??) on what to do about RIPE whois servers.

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Thu Mar 31 08:07:32 MET DST 1994  ---------