telnet interface

Geert Jan,

Aah,  I'd thought from the mail thread that people were saying there
was a telnet update interface.  Thanks for the info that this isn't true.
(Though I think much of NANOG has been led to think it is true now).

> Am I missing something?

Well, as a developer I *never* use email--running dbupdate is so much
more direct (even when the size of my mailbox is under a thousand).
I haven't thought the details through, but a user dbupdate client
that he could use the same way I do:

     #!/bin/dwim
     whois XXX > tmp
     vi tmp
     dbupdate tmp

would seem to be pretty easy to build, including the PGP stuff.  

--Dale

============ From: Geert Jan de Groot 

> From geertj at ripe.net Wed Apr 19 19:01:28 1995
> To: "Dale S. Johnson" <dsj at merit.edu>
> Cc: rr-impl at ripe.net
> Subject: Re: telnet interface 
> Date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 01:00:16 +0200
> 
> On Wed, 19 Apr 1995 16:59:34 -0400  "Dale S. Johnson" wrote:
> >   Today's discussion of the IRR on nanog has had a couple of references to
> > a telnet interface to the RIPE database.
> > 
> >   Is there code for this in the distribution?  Any hints on how you set
> > it up?  (Is it in docs anywhere?)
> 
> There is a telnet interface for database lookups (telnet to info.ripe.net);
> you probably don't want the code (info.ripe.net is planned to be rebuilt
> for more than a year now, but time is lacking).
> 
> There is no telnet interface for updates. There are a couple of reasons
> I can think of why a telnet interface is not a good idea:
> 1. The email interface is generally found sufficient, because a response
>    (positive or negative) is received within minutes (max), essentially
>    limited by the speed two email messages are sent/received
>    (people that have connectivity bad enough for mail to take more than
>    a minute probably do not want interactive telnet...)
> 2. Telnet has no authentication mechanism. Somehow I feel that some kind
>    of 'login' authentication isn't a good idea.
> 3. Email has an easy way to log transactions. logging telnet is much
>    more difficult...
> 4. I can't think of an easy way to authenticate new objects. cut/paste
>    of PGP signatures looks painful to me. Email headers are useless;
>    people apperently aren't too fond of password authentication.
> 
> Am I missing something?
> 
> Geert Jan



-------- Logged at  Thu Apr 20 10:47:36 MET DST 1995  ---------