Subject: [weirds] My notes from bar BOF

From: Steve Sheng <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 11:56:15 -0700

Hi all, for those of you that are not in the bar BOF, here are some informal
notes from my recollection. If you were in that session, please feel free to
correct/add.  

Kind regards, 
Steve

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Rough Number of Attendees: 40

Pete R. asked that this has been done in the past (IRIS), and there is
little adoption, why would this time be different?

- Andy mentioned that technically speaking IRIS is heavy weight. One of the
reasons that hindered IRIS's adoption is that it uses NAPTR. IRIS also uses
BEEP for transport as they were not allowed to use HTTP at the time. This
made it difficult to write clients and servers for IRIS. Compared with IRIS,
the RESTful approach reuses the HTTP component, and it does not use NAPTR.

- Steve S mentioned that ICANN's is looking to improve WHOIS including
support for internationalized registration data. They looked at several
alternatives (extending WHOIS, IRIS, RWS), and thought that the RESTful
approach by ARIN is most promising. So they did a pilot (documented in the
internet draft) to understand RWS better.

Participants discussed what are the problems to solve, and listed four:

- standardized/machine parsable output.

- support internationalized registration data

- Be able to support different users

- Better referral features

Pete R. asked if we developed this, would there be people willing to write
clients? Who are the consumers? Are there any evidence that _client_ people
want this? 

- Jeff H. mentioned that they rely on this data heavily, and they would
write clients to use it.

- Peter K. disagreed, "it only benefits secondary domain industries, and
that the end user is ok with the current status quo."
 
- the area directors would like to move this conversation onto the mailing
list to make sure that there will actually be people willing to write
clients for it, and people actually willing to use it.

Someone raised whether it make sense to do IRIS over HTTP?

- Andy mentioned that IRIS is tied to XML, and if alternative formats are
desired (JSON), then IRIS over HTTP might not work.

Andrew S. asked if people have any comments for the drafts?

- One comment, there is no schema for ARIN's draft. Harald A. asked Andy to
take an action item to add schema to ARIN's draft.

- Peter K. mentioned that there is a need to separate policy from technical.
In particular, the draft requirement document seems to be mixing policy
requirements with technical ones.

Andrew S. asked if people are willing to work on it and review drafts?

- About 10 people raised their hands.

*************************************************************************

On 7/29/11 1:25 PM, "Andy Newton" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 
> On Jul 28, 2011, at 7:55 PM, =JeffH wrote:
> 
>> I spose we oughta ask "what /did/ happen with IRIS deployment and what would
>> you do differently if you did it over again?"....
>> 
>> IRIS - An Overview for the ICANN Whois Task Force
>> Andrew Newton, VeriSign Labs
>> Leslie Daigle, VeriSign Labs
>> April 29, 2004
>> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/dow1tf/pdfXH57SShw9O.pdf
> 
> Perhaps people didn't like the font weight and accent color of the slide
> presentation? :)
> 
> VeriSign did have a pilot IRIS server refreshed daily with data from their
> registry up and running, in addition to their previous Whois-LDAP server pilot
> up and running. Neither saw much traffic.
> 
> As an exercise as to why, I suggest you spend one hour attempting to construct
> a simple IRIS client to query for information about a domain name. For
> comparison, also spend one hour attempting to construct a simple Whois-RWS
> client to query an IP address from ARIN's Whois restful web service.
> 
> -andy
> _______________________________________________
> weirds mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds

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From: Peter Koch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 09:15:22 +0200

minuted Bar BOFs sound scary, but thanks!

> that the end user is ok with the current status quo."

i believe i said this in the context of DCHK or more general in the context
of "domain availability checks" of any flavour.  Primary user appears to
be the secondary domain market and this group apparently has learned to live
with a variety of protocols, some of them more or less proprietary.

-Peter

---

From: Dave Piscitello <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 05:20:52 -0700

I suppose you want a copy of the covert recording, mistrustful muggle that you are...

It's already been sent to The Ministry of Magic :-O