In message <[email protected]>, at
13:28:24 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Jim Reid <[email protected]> writes
On 22 Sep 2014, at 13:06, Roland Perry <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, we both know that for this specific case Roland the holding
entity does still exist. It just has a different name.
Not really. The entity has been "reorganised", the address allocation
used elsewhere within government via various departments concerned
with "delivery" of government services. It's actually quite messy.
True. But that's internal detail for the address holder which is nobody
else's business.
Sounds to me more like a transfer to me; the original address-holder was
one specified department, not the whole of HM Government. Perhaps it
would have saved a lot of grief if the original allocation had been to
the latter in the first place.
We understand that FUBAR is the current address holder and contact
for FOO/8.
This is the crux - how does IANA come to the understanding?
It could poll the holders of these /8s once a year. Or ask them to keep
the info about those allocations up to date. No big deal. There are
only a handful of /8s which could be problematical. And since IPv4 is
just about used up, it's hard to see why anyone should be worrying
about those legacy /8s. As I said before, if someone thinks this really
matters, they are welcome to feed their concerns into the IANA
oversight discussions.
Perhaps they will.
But it does matter if (one or more of): The building whose address is
mentioned has closed, the phone numbers and emails don't work any
more, the named person has retired, the addresses appear to be used by
completely different bits of the government as well.
Yeah. But this is no different from a teeny subset of the problem space
for whois in the context of domain names. All of the above concerns
(and more) exist for domain names. The world just has to cope with
that, even if the answers are not to everyone's liking.
In the case of /8's it's more like an entire ccTLD going off the grid.
Frankly, I think it's a waste of time focusing on whois at all.
The entries in IANA's /8 table aren't really a whois, they are a hint at
what one of the lines in the whois might be.
--
Roland Perry
