Contact Data in the RIPE Database

1
Contact Data in the RIPE Database

• Shane Kerr
• RIPE NCC
• ltshane_at_ripe.netgt

2
Background Goal

• Certain kinds of data have caused problems
• Domain objects (heavy use by ccTLDs)
• Person objects (heavy use by ccTLDs, etc.)
• Cleanups have been made in the past
• Consistency fixes
• Deletions of unnecessary data, one-time and
  ongoing
• Small numbers of inconsistencies not a problem
• Perform some measurement of data quality

3
Contact Data

• Contacts are
• Referenced by resources recorded in the Database
• Administrative or technical
• Contacts have
• Name
• Postal address
• Phone number
• E-mail address

4
Focus on e-mail

• Name impossible to check
• Postal address/phone number difficult to check
• E-mail possible
• Sadly optional for person objects

5
Checking the addresses

• Unique e-mail extracted (about 500,000 in all)
• Syntax check to remove garbage and bad TLD
• Unique domains extracted (about 280,000 in all)
• DNS checked
• Algorithm from RFC 2821
• MX lookups, with fallback to A lookups
• SMTP checked
• VRFY unreliable
• Use RSET, MAIL, RCPT for each e-mail
• Minimise connections (only 140,000 unique IPs)

6
E-mail results
7
Refusal Codes
8
Interpreting the Results

• 20 of e-mail addresses can never be reached
• 80 may still fail
• Depends on mail software and configuration
• Impossible to check further without delivering
  mail
• Even delivered mail may never be read

9
aut-num results
10
inetnum results
objects

• A significant percentage of inetnum objects have
  no valid e-mail address.
• A much smaller percentage of actual IP addresses
  has no valid e-mail address, but still a
  significant amount.
• Most of these are because the e-mail attribute
  is optional in the person object.

IP addresses
11
Conclusions Questions

• Many networks have no reachable contacts
• e-mail being optional is a significant reason
• Is this a problem? If so, how big of a problem?
• Possible actions
• Make e-mail mandatory
• Check e-mail reachability on person
  creation/update
• Put a remark on networks with unreachable
  contacts
• Return parent networks if contacts unreachable