Hello all and happy new year! To answer Wilfried's first question, in almost all cases we check for the values to be within defined (or logical) ranges. In the new RIPE Database update software we have centralised definitions for these kind of values and other syntax check and business rules. Now it is very easy to either add/remove or adjust new checks. In general, missing syntax checks are considered software bugs and will be fixed as soon as they are discovered by us or reported by our users. Your second question is aimed at the community and we are also interested to know what community thinks the rules should be. At the moment for the RIPE Database business rule checks we have a mix of both scenarios: - The Routing Registry part of RIPE Database is more liberal and is mainly bound to syntax checks (e.g. ROUTE(6) objects, set objects and AUT-NUM's routing attributes). - The Resource Registry part -- mainly to enforce policies -- has many business rules and checks embedded into it. Two examples are name server provisioning checks for domain objects which is far beyond checking the "nserver:" attribute syntax and INET(6)NUM "status:" attribute checks. Kind regards, Kaveh --- Kaveh Ranjbar, RIPE NCC Database Group Manager On Jan 2, 2013, at 2:24 PM, Wilfried Woeber <Woeber@CC.UniVie.ac.at> wrote:
Q to the DB Team: is the software doing any checks against numeric values as numbers or is the data treated/stored exclusively as text?
As a sort of more general sideline, there may be other limits or boundary conditions, and I am wondering where the proper place is to "enforce" those. I know about the 'be rigorous about what you transmit and liberal (and careful) in what you accept'. But I wonder whether that would not apply to tools just equally?