[Arin-whoisrws] Non-normalized ASNs and duplicate Customer objects

[Andy Newton]

Ross,

I'm sorry for the delayed response.  I'll answer your questions in-line:

On Jul 16, 2010, at 1:48 PM, Ross Vandegrift wrote:

> 1) Is there a reason that Network objects don't return normalized data
> for originASes?  ASN are quite easy to search for, but the rest of the
> data is well-normalized, and I'm kinda of surprised not to get a list
> of originASRefs.  It's no major impediment, just a bit odd.

ASN entities in our registration system represent blocks of AS numbers that ARIN has handed out.  Like networks, they are entities "registered" in our database.  However, when a network operator specifies an origin AS on a network, that AS number can come from any RIR.  In other words, the origin AS numbers on networks are not entities that are registered by ARIN, and they have none of the meta-data associated with an actual ASN registration.

> 2) Is there a reason that identical customer records weren't merged
> during creation?  If a single entity has multiple SWIPs in WHOIS, it
> looks like a new Customer object has been created for each Network.
> This is pretty counter-intuitive.  Shouldn't these be merged into a
> single record?

At present, simple reassignment SWiPs automatically create a new customer record, and there really is no good way for us to merge them automatically that would not induce some error.  However, we have kept the customer record separated out in the data model for the future possibility of re-using the same customer with multiple network reassignments.  Currently it is not possible to do this with the email templating registration system using simple reassignments, but we are looking into the possibility of allowing it in the new RESTful registration service that is in development.

Thanks for your questions Ross.  I hope these answers help, and we are glad to hear that you are being quite successful with the code integration of Whois-RWS.

Andy Newton
Chief Engineer
ARIN