Re: Merging RRP and Whois

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

My own feeling is different.  I consider that any reasonable
registrar-registry mechanism needs contain mechanisms by which one asks
for the existing registration state.

In the RRP case, that query mechanism is pretty much registrar
asking/registry responding.  And since we've got to leave the door open to
IPv6 and other kinds of data, the data representation needs to be
exensible.

It seems to me that it is only a matter of using that extensibility to
make that same mechanism work so that a client/customer may ask a status
question of a registry or registrar.

The larger issues to me are those of a) identification/authentication of
the parties and b) authorization and privacy.  I'd like to think that we
could be clever enough to invent mechanisms that would handle both
sitations - registrar as status querier and customer as status querier.

It seems to me that much of the issue of authorization and privacy can be
handled by having server implementations call out out policy servers much
as we are starting to do for configuration, QoS, and capacity
provisioning.  My sense is that if one comes up with a well structured
data representation for the queries and responses that one can come up
with a policy definition structure that meshes.

The biggest issue - that of identification/authentication of both the
querier and the responder are, to my mind, the biggest ones.  In the RRP
situation we have a limited set of players making it possible to simply
use sneakernet techniques to get id/auth data to the various participants.

		--karl--