How about a major oversimplification of a fix. Closed mailing list. One primary contact for each company is designated and allowed to join the list. Every 2 weeks (maybe a month?) an email is autogenerated that must be ACK'd or that companies NOC entry is considered stale. The person on the mailing list is responsible for ensuring contact info is updated. Participants in the list would be able to send a request to the list for current info on another noc...not a web page. Something more along the line of: To: noc-list@whoever.com From: authorized@whoever1.com Subject: NOC: usweb.com The mailing list would respond with the most current NOC information -- and the info could be distributed so if one server was down, another server could be queried. Elimiates the spammer friendly 'whois'. Hey, maybe it could even provide a time-sensitive response :) The contact info that is provided is kept -confidential- between the participants of the list, though some leakage will happen. Maybe getting address space would have a requirement that the company have a participant. Now, any volunteers for housing the database? Maybe ARIN... BTW, I think the line printer idea rules :) Derek Elder US Web / Gray Peak Technologies Network Engineering 212-548-7468 Pager - 888-232-5028 delder@graypeak.com http://www.usweb.com A Strategic Partner for the Information Age. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Michael Dillon Sent: Monday, July 13, 1998 5:17 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: NOC communications On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, Sean Donelan wrote:
The contact information which I only give out directly to other NOCs has NEVER been abused.
Here is the key to this problem. How can you publish contact information in such a way that it only goes to other NOCs. And conversely, how can you ensure that you have access to the contact information of all other NOCs. I suspect that there may be a way for the IP registries (ARIN, RIPE and APNIC) to facilitate this with some kind of replicated database in which change notifications only go out to entities listed in the database. That way every NOC could maintain their own complete copy of a global NOC contacts database and the only need for queries would be to process update notifications and do the occasional resync with the master copy.
Yeah, right.
Dear Sprint, Vab is gone. Since you have not updated your contact information in a prompt fashion, your AS numbers will be withdrawn at Midnight. Have a nice day.
This *WILL* be happening in the near future. Not maintaining up to date contact info is tantamount to aiding and abetting DoS attacks. It won't be long now before there is some government scrutiny of operational practices which are related to finding and fixing failures fast.
That is until they read about themselves on the front-page of the New York Times. Then the managers start yelling at the engineers "Why didn't you tell us it was a problem."
Smart engineers are proactive and warn their managers of the dangers of not following prudent operational practices.
Maybe we can have this discussion again in another six months.
Please do. I know that your regular rehashing of these issues has had a positive impact on a lot of providers. -- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com