On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 11:04:27AM +0200, Michael van Elst wrote:
On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 10:20:36PM +0200, Andre Koopal wrote:
given
whois -h whois.ripe.net dom.ain.de
returning <handle>-DENIC, so i then follow with
whois -h whois.ripe.net <handle>-DENIC
i can only conclude, givem the first quoted paragraph above, that the data must be manually entered in both databases or that ripe mirrors denic's database.
Seems like we need a referal meganisme for nic-handles?
You would need global nic-handles that somehow identify their database. Unfortunately this does not work if there is no single handle namespace.
All nic-hdls we are talking about seems to end in the name of their source: -RIPE, -IS, -DENIC (or -DE?) so in my opinion that makes them both unique and gives an easy way to build a referal meganism. The only handles that fails this are the internic hdls, but they have always been separate ... And we don't really want cross references for nic-hdls, although it might have the advantage of a single place to maintain your handle, but we want to extend the referal meganism in place for domains to work with handles as well. All IMHO. Regards, Andre
Fortunately this isn't really a problem as I (we?) don't want handle cross references. Such cross references only make sense if you want to achieve that a single person has a unique handle in all databases.
While a unique and single handle for a person is a nice looking idea it simply does not work as maintainership of handles becomes more complex with the increasing number of database maintainers involved.
When the person data is stored together with the domain data the handles are again only locally valid and a referral of the domain also resolves the person data nicely. There is no need for more complex mechanisms.
BTW, those that really want cross references can translate whois data into hypertext and use URLs to locate data on arbitrary servers.
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