[Ietf-not43] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-crisp-internet-resource-number-req-00.txt

[Eric A. Hall]

on 8/20/2003 11:42 AM Shane Kerr wrote:

> David Blacka wrote:

>> On Tuesday 19 August 2003 06:00 am, Shane Kerr wrote:

>>> - Given a range, find all the networks that are fully within that 
>>> range; "-M" in RIPE-land, or "all subnets" in your terminology
>>> 
>>> - Given a range, find only the least specific networks that are
>>> fully within that range; "-m" in RIPE-land, or "subnets" in your
>>> terminology
>> 
>> Ok, is "least specific" the same thing as largest, in this context?
>> I guess I'm not sure how to define this search.
> 
> Well, it includes the largest networks.  For instance, given this
> query:
> 
> 193.0.0.0 - 193.0.31.255

[...]

I'm going to guess that David is having some of the same problems I had
when Ed Lewis was describing the same kind of syntax, which is that
specifying the range as the query value is just strange.

I'm not entirely sure if there isn't a disconnect here. For WHOIS queries
this kind of syntax is okay since the dumb-terminal client is talking to a
front-end parser that is part of a monolithic back-end. In distributed
models, however, the client is supposed to be the front-end parser that
maps the input to a canonical value and the server's role is reduced to
handling the database lookup. In that regard, having the client pass raw
input to the server negates the benefits of the model, and feels wrong.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/