Subject: Re: [weirds] bootstrapping name servers and entities

From: Andy Newton <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 13:21:12 +0000

On 6/30/13 8:34 PM, "Byron Ellacott" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>What's the use case for doing a global lookup on an entity handle?  These
>handles don't have any significance or meaning outside of the context of
>the registry they're created in, whereas domains, IP networks, AS numbers,
>and nameservers all do have a life of their own.

That's a very good question. Why do we have an entity query at all?
Obviously because people put these handles into clients.

>An entity handle is most likely to only be seen in the context of a result
>from a previous lookup, in which case it would be wise to include the
>"self" link for any RDAP response such that the problem of knowing where
>that entity handle might be found can be translated to handing around
>entity "self" links instead of handles.

Agreed.

>
>(Or make the handle a URI instead of an opaque string).

That would be preferable. But the entity handles already exist.
Additionally, can't this argument be made for most other object types?

>
>A global search for an entity by name or other attributes has more of a
>use case in my mind, but how to bootstrap for *search* is an even hairier
>problem, I think.

That's a world of pain I don't think we should attempt to address.

-andy

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Jul 2013 14:51:36 -0000

>Obviously because people put these handles into clients.

Yes, but since we seem to agree is that the only place you will get a
handle is (perhaps indirectly) from a WHOIS or RDAP response, you send
the query back to the same place.  There will doubtless be situations
where someone finds a handle saved in a web page or something and
can't tell where it came from, but I don't see that it's up to us to
solve this impossible problem.

I agree that putting a link in responses to remind the client to go
back to the same place is at worst harmless, and might conceivably
be useful if subregistries borrow handles from their parents.

R's,
John

---

From: Ernie Dainow <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 15:25:56 -0400

If the recent ICANN proposal for ARDS (Aggregated Registration Data
Service) materializes, as a centralized service, it will be straight
forward for a client to do lookups by handles and searches across
TLD/Number boundaries. For the first release of RDAP, we should defer any
attempt to bootstrap such queries across multiple authoritative servers,
until such time as this is really required.

Section 6 in json-response-04 recommends that all objects contain a link.
For a consistent method that clients can rely on to get information for
handles, we could consider changing SHOULD to MUST:
   For every object class in a response, whether the
   object class is directly representing the response to a query or is
   embedded in other object classes, servers SHOULD provide a link
   representing a URI for that object class using the "self"
   relationship

Another approach that might be more useful to clients is to return a link
only when there is additional information not already contained in the
returned object. For example, a domain object that has an entity containing
all available information should not return a link in the entity object, so
that the client does not waste time making another request for information
it already has.

-Ernie

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:51 AM, John Levine <[email-masked]> wrote:

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