Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet wrote:
Denis Walker wrote: [....]
The first one concerns maintaining all objects in the RIPE Database, which followed from a recommendation from the Data Protection Task Force (DP TF) (see below). We have already had some preliminary discussions about this with the DP TF. They provided the RIPE NCC with some very useful feedback, which is incorporated in this proposal.
2 question regarding implementation details...
[...]
New startup Send an update message to dbupdate to create a person object and a mntner object. These must be the first two objects in an update message, in any order.
1) This sentence, and the explanation that follows, implies that exactly *two* objects are required here and supported. It should work, even for the cases where admin-c: and tech-c: are (to be) different. Just double-checking.
Not quite right. My view is that these two mutually referencing objects must be the FIRST two in an update message. There can be other objects in the message also, but unrelated to this 'startup procedure'. To avoid over complicating the code we want to keep it simple and only have 2 objects with the mutual reference for the new creation. If you want a different admin-c and tech-c in the new mntner, none of which currently exist, first create the new mntner/person pair using the one person as both admin-c and tech-c. Then create the second person and modify the mntner.
2) I suppose the use of auto-X instead of an explicit handle would be supported here as well, as in similar chicken and egg situations?
Yes....I should have used AUTO- in the examples to make that clearer. regards Denis Walker RIPE NCC
The references to each other must also be in place. The database software will accommodate this.
person: Den is address: RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) address: Singel 258 address: 1016 AB Amsterdam address: The Netherlands phone: +31 20 535 4444 nic-hdl: DW-RIPE mnt-by: aardvark-mnt notify: denis@ripe.net changed: denis@ripe.net 20040318 source: RIPE
mntner: AARDVARK-MNT descr: Mntner for denis' objects. admin-c: DW-RIPE tech-c: DW-RIPE upd-to: denis@ripe.net auth: X509-1 notify: denis@ripe.net mnt-by: AARDVARK-MNT referral-by: RIPE-DBM-MNT changed: denis@ripe.net 20040225 source: RIPE
The update software will recognise that the first person/mntner object references a non-existent mntner/person object. It will check that this referenced object is next in the update message. If it is, the "mnt- by:" attribute will be removed from the person object. The person and mntner objects will be created, and then the person object will be modified to add back the "mnt-by:" attribute.
The objects are now fully configured and can be used. The person object can be referenced by any other object where a nic-hdl is referenced. It can also be linked to the white pages. The mntner can be used to protect any data in the database.
If the non-existent referenced object is not next in the update message then an error message will be generated and the update will fail. This is the current behaviour.
Wilfried.