[arin-ppml] Reclamation of Number Resources

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <CAEmG1=q==E0k56w5cVAnrSEKPD8rkToAWgCByGTTpnbcxSEtQg at mail.gmail.com>
Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com> wrote:

>*sigh*
>
>That should have been "for there is NO proof."
>
>Apologies for not catching that before hitting send.

That's alright.  We are all human and we all make mistakes.  That has been
one of the points I have tried, in my own feeble way, to make from the outset.

I believe that it is incontrovertable from the uncontested facts I've
presented that _somebody_ made a mistake in this case.  Regardless of
any suggestion to the contrary it is not, and has not been among my goals
in presenting this case to have anyone castrated as punishment for the
mistake that was made.  I am a software engineer by trade and by training,
and my first instinct is always to find the bug in the process and to
patch it.  And that's my real goal.  (We can argue about who, if anybody,
should be forced to stand in the corner wearing a dunce cap later on.)

In the aftermath of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, a commission
of eminent subject matter experts was empaneled to answer the dual questions
of what happened and how a repetition of this tragic event could be avoided
in the future.  The commission achieved both goals.

Although there is clearly no comparison between that event and the rather
mundane deviance from ARIN policy that we have been discussing, I do
believe that it would also be worthwhile in this instance to understand
what happened in order to debug any processes that may require adjustment
in order to avoid future such cases.  If it was all down to simple human
error, then perhaps the addition of a simple additional safety latch into
the overall process is all that is required in order to fix the problem
once and for all.


Regards,
rfg