Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited. Minutes from the RWhois Working group Reported by: Mark Kosters and Scott Williamson Integration of the InterNIC's Guardian object was discussed. Mark Kosters gave a presentation on how it would be hooked into the current RWhois protocol. The question was asked "can there be multiple guardians?" the answer was yes. Scott Williamson lead the group through a general discussion related to RWhois operation. The issue of hierarchical handles was discussed. It is important that object handles be globally unique. The issue of notification was discussed. There are several issues regarding the implementation of notification which is currently used in the InterNIC's guardian. Notification is necessary to ensure that object's used by auto registrations such as a name server cause a notification to the owner of the server object. The issue of non-hierarchical data discovery was discussed. A solution will be necessary for use in areas such as the .us domain ( to find the domain for a company by name ). The current thinking is to feed the non- hierarchical data to an indexer (like CIP). There was great concern about the scaling for the indexing system described. Interfaces into other database engines were discussed. The development team's concerns are speed and flexibility related to the current RWhois database. The database interfaces discussed were: oracle, ingres, and sybase. The group asked that we add msql and ra-addb. The issue of inserting a server into a class tree was discussed. The current process is to get a referral template from ftp://rs.internic.net/ templates/rwhois-template.txt, and send it to rwhoisreg@internic.net. Once received, the template will generate a referral object that will be added to the RWhois root. Each referral must have an SOA record that defines the authority area. An update of the InterNIC's RWhois tree status was given. The InterNIC RWhois root (root for domain and network classes) contains over 1.7 million objects and has distinct referral objects to over 45 servers, each with several authority areas. A pull-up tool has been written to facilitate the collection of data related to the IP space. However, for this tool to work correctly it is important to establish SOA records in each server that are referred to by the root server. NSI has established a development team whose primary effort is to stabilize the current public domain RWhois server and build a reliable root infrastructure for the InterNIC data. A cut of the NSI RWhois server (Version 1.0 beta 8) has an estimated release date of July 8. The focus of this release is the enhancement of the indexer. There was some discussion about the performance of a hierarchical system with a single root. This area needs a lot of work. The development team's approach so far has included a strong secondary mechanism to allow multiple distributed roots, and the ability to cache the referrals down the tree. The next major release is expected to contain non-hierarchical support, secondary server support, and guardian integration. We also discussed the need for multiple roots for each class tree. During the free discussion the following topics were discussed: The group noted that we need to ensure security for secondary operations. It was noted that you can go sideways if you cache referrals further down the tree. The group noted that it may be very important to cache referrals to the closest ancestor so that roots don't get overwhelmed. It was suggested that DNS should be used when ever possible to ensure that the RWhois root doesn't get hit too much. The development team was also advised to watch out for being flat on non-hierarchical data. There was also some discussion about not pleasing "all the people all the time." The group felt that indexing non-hierarchical data is not necessarily our problem. Scott and Mark explained the Max hits in the RWhois server. This doesn't mean that the sever can't hold more data, but that a wild card type search has resulted in a number of hits that exceed the number allowed by the server. The group also discussed privacy of data briefly. We agreed that it is an issue, but is being discussed in several other groups around the IETF. The development team noted that a near term goal was to make the RWhois server easier to install. The group requested tools to convert from the ripe database format to RWhois.