On Sun, 12 Jul 1998, John Todd wrote:
While I'd LOVE to see a line printer banging away in a corner on a 2400 baud Ku band "gas-station" style uplink, I don't see that happening. Besides, someone would have to centrally coordinate that - you think ARIN would mind taking on a multi-national satellite communications network? Sure - just hike the price for an AS number to, say, $4000 a year and make it mandatory that each AS has one of these systems in house. Right.
Don't laugh. Something like this *WILL* happen. The trend is for the Internet to subsume the world's telephone network and it may even extend beyond that to subsuming television and radio as well. This makes it critical infrastructure and if the industry doesn't solve the emergency NOC commnications problem then a solution will be legislated.
Part 1: ARIN should be a fascist for maintaining correct information.
This is in process. Cleaning up dirty info takes time. Getting a procedure in place to maintain it clean takes time. It would help if more ARIN members would make their wishes for correct database info known to ARIN so that it is clear what priority to give this.
Phone numbers should be audited. I'm a big fan of "turn it off and see who comes running" update procedures. If someone doesn't respond within a reasonable number of attempts, or information is out of date for X period of time, enforce policy by denial of service.
This is not unlike the domain name model where contact info is somewhat verified once per year during renewals and if you don't renew then the registration is gone. But how can we do this with IP addresses? Should ARIN announce a null0 route for an IP block when contact info goes stale? This seems rather like using a sledgehammer to swat a flea. On the other hand, maybe there should be a multistep procedure that terminates with exactly that result? In my judgement, the current ARIN Advisory Council and Board of Trustees are not interesting in sticking with the status quo ante. If things can be done better then we are able to make changes and intend to make changes to do things better. If you have suggestions, then we will look at them seriously. I think most AC and BoT members are on this list so any discussions here could play a big role in our decisions in the future. -- 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