On 30 Nov 98, at 17:14, Hank Nussbacher quoted someone who had written:

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As a matter of fact the referral mechanism was seen as a way for ccTLD administrators to include information in the Database pointing to their own authoritative sources of information.

I can confirm that this was indeed the intention when this was first

the RIPE (25, I think) DNS-WG meeting.

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* > The RIPE NCC is therefore acting according to users directives that were * > discussed and agreed on an open way. *

Yes and no, I have to say.

At RIPE 31, the functionality proposed certainly appeared to me to be what had been sought. I am no longer certain that this is indeed the case. In

the following surprises have arisen.

First, the key notion of making the referral function available per TLD at the option of the TLD registry concerned seems to have been lost. This is a fundamental element of the original concept of over two years ago.

Second, the "feature" of returning the data relating to the parent domain in the case that the specified domain cannot be found seems to me to have nothing to do with referral. The referral concept has to do with re-directing the query to an authoritative whois server, not with second-guessing the intent behind the query and substituting other data which is available locally. I suggest

"feature" be declared a bug and removed.

I am sure that these technical problems are based on misunderstandings which can easily be resolved.

A more significant surprise is that TLD registries, who have had no specific prior notification, now find that data about their domains is being returned in response to a class of query for which this was not formerly the case, and

At 06:35 PM 12/1/98 +0000, Niall O'Reilly wrote: proposed in particular, that this that

they have to deal with the unexpected fallout.

Niall, Thank you for bringing sanity to this! I am sure now that this can all be cleared up and we can all go back to what we are all doing and let RIPE continue working the way it has always done - with no hiccups, technical excellence and 3 years ahead of the USA. -Hank

Niall O'Reilly

IE Domain Registry at UCD Chair, RIPE TLD-WG