This is the NCC's current thinking aout NIC handles. This is a quick dump, so If you have questions, please ask. Please comment! Daniel As decided at the last meeting we need to introduce unique handles in order to deal with ambiguities in the RIPE database. Especially accidental overwriting of persons will be a problem in the future with more than 10000 persons in the database now. After some discussion with the InterNIC we have concluded that a worldwide handle space is not realistic. In fact Australia has already started with their own space. Therefore we propose to start issuing RIPE handles as soon as technically feasible. Person handles will then be of the form XYZ123-INIC ABC457-RIPE .... Each physical person will eventually have one such handle only in order to facilitate database exchanges between NICs and database maintenance. RIPE handles will be assigned by sending in a person entry to auto-dbm with somethin like nic-hdl: assign which will cause the entry to be added with a new unique handle assigned. If there are other persons with the same name their entries will be returned as a check against multiple registrations. The NCC will *not* automatically assign handles to persons without handles on a "flag day". Local registries or the persons themselvews will have to do that. The reason for that is that all conflicts would need to be resolved beforehand and all persons notified of the change. This is too cumbersone, if not impossible. The NCC will flag possible conflicts present in the database today and help resolve them by notifying everyone involved and by assigning handles to all persons involved if necessary. In the future, handles will have to be used in the contact attributes (tech-c, admin-c, zone-c) in order to maintain unambiguous references. The recommended value for the contact attributes will be to list *both* name and handle in order to guard against typos in handles. Name only and handle only will also still be allowed. It might be necessary to disallow name only at some point when the majority of persons have a handle. Daniel