LS, On 13 Apr 2004, at 17:23, Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet wrote:
This simple counting approach is potentially VERY misleading, as it is not the sheer _number_ of individual entries which should be counted, but the _size_ of the address blocks covered in this hierarchy.
I'ld like to see or hear the argument behind this assertion. I can see that it is useful to be aware of what proportion of the address space is within the scope of some abuse contact or other. This gives us a sense of the scale of the problem, and the extent to which it is already solved. IMHO, we should count whatever will give us a measure of the amount of effort (work, energy) we need to exert to deal with the problem at hand. If we propose to intervene at the level of individual addresses, counting them will be useful. I suggest that a more realistic estimate of the effort involved will be based on intervention at a more aggregated level, and that we should count whatever the operations are which we need to make at that aggregated level. That's what I've tried to present, with a proposed method for estimating the effort involved. I haven't seen any serious counter-argument. By the way, I see an entry for "inetnum: 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255". One "straw man" starting point, which gives a very attractive (but of course totally misleading) lower bound on the effort involved, is to choose to address the problem at this level of aggregation. By implementing the "abuse-mailbox" distinguished attribute, and updating just one database object, the problem would be solved! N'est-ce pas? 8-) Valete! Niall