AltDB?

Sat Jan 8 08:24:00 UTC 2011

> From: David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org>
> Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 21:01:52 -1000
> 
> > do you have a specific proposal? i've noted in the past that arin tries
> > hard to stick to its knitting, which is allocation and allocation policy.
> 
> Yes. This is a positive (IMHO), however it seems that occasionally,
> ARIN's knitting tangles up folks who don't necessarily involve
> themselves with ARIN's existing interaction mechanisms (at least
> directly).

the price of changing what ARIN does is, at a minimum: participation.

> > it seems to me that if some in the community wanted arin to run SIGs
> > or WGs on things like routing policy arin could do it but that a lot
> > of folks would say that's mission creep and that it would be arin
> > poaching on nanog lands.
> 
> The issue I see is that there are non-address allocation{, policy}
> topics that can deeply affect network operations in which ARIN has a
> direct role, yet network operators (outside of the normal ARIN
> participants) have no obvious mechanism in which to
> comment/discuss/etc.  Examples would include reverse DNS operations,
> whois database-related issues (operations, schema, access methods,
> etc.), (potentially?) RPKI, etc.  It doesn't seem appropriate to me
> for these to be discussed in relation to addressing policy nor are the
> issues associated with those examples necessarily related to address
> allocation, hence I wouldn't think they'd be fodder for ppml.

they are, though.  i understand the subtlety of the question, "is that a
policy matter?" but discussions on ppml@ have led to determinations of
"what is lameness?" and "when is a nameserver so lame that it's better to
remove it from in-addr than to leave it in?"  i hear in what you're saying
a desire to have a way to impact ARIN's behaviour outside of NRPM edits
and perhaps ARIN does need to address this with some new online forum for
things which aren't allocation policy but which should still be decided
using community input.  (as i recall my first act as a new ARIN trustee
was to sign onto a policy proposal that would have changed the way e-mail
templates worked, and at the end of the process the ARIN BoT shot it down
because it wasn't a policy, and i understood that decision.  strange, eh?)

> ...
> 
> So, in other words, no, I don't really have a specific proposal.

perhaps others will chime in.  i will continue to think about it also.