I switched over to vultr a few weeks ago. To get my BGP announced there,
they needed to do the manual verification. After 1 week of no response by
the ampr.org team I have had to start with a new ticket and the manual
process again.
Is there more than one person than can validate the manual BGP verification
process?
Corey N3FE
> I know this process can be invasive but you would be surprised how
many bogus requests I've received over the years. I have to assume this
is because of the scarcity of IPv4 addresses
I agree with that! I also get requests from people who just want to use
it for internet hosting unrelated to amateur radio, and without
mentioning a valid callsign at all.
Of course Quan also does not mention his callsign in his mailinglist
message. A lookup on QRZ.COM indicates he likely has a BG3 callsign,
but for me it would be suspicious when I receive a communication like
that because any radio amateur knows that it is customary to use a
callsign rather than only first and last name when communicating between
radio amateurs.
Just last week I got (as the coordinator for Netherlands) a request from
someone likely living in Denmark (a nearby country) with just a fake
word in the callsign field. Maybe he got turned away by the Danish
coordinator and tried with me, maybe he wasn't even aware of the
subnetting by country, I don't know.
But we really need to watch out for people trying to masquerade as a
radio amateur and trying to obtain IP space for free.
Of course it doesn't help that the portal does not convey that
information. It is likely that googling for services offering IP space
somehow refers those people directly to the portal or to a subpage of
the wiki, they read some paragraphs about obtaining IP space and never
see what is the target audience for this system.
That is mentioned only in some toplevel pages, not in the actual
procedures for obtaining addresses.
Someone from outside our community may not know what "callsign" means
and just enter a netname as they would use in whois.
So there is room for improvement there.
About the ID and personal info requirement, I certainly have not been
asked for an ID photo and it would be a problem to have such things on
file indeed.
But having some personal contact info (like name, callsign, e-mail and
street address) should be fine as it is required to contact the
registrant in case of problems.
Rob PE1CHL
