Geoff Joy wrote:
When I lookup someone by their old callsign, it just says "Expired" and there is no indication that the same person now has another callsign. This made me reluctant to delete address assignments based on that lookup.
But if the call sign is expired should a reference to it be maintained in the ampr.org DNS? I'd be inclined to purge expired call signs rather than let an invalid reference remain in the database.
When someone notifies me of their changed callsign (or I happen to read or hear about it) I add the new callsign as the first item on the hosts file line, keeping the old callsign as a second name. E.g.:
44.137.0.25 pa7rp pa3bba # ruud
When the info is sent to the ampr.org DNS robot, an entry like this is sent as:
pa7rp IN A 44.137.0.25 pa3bba IN CNAME pa7rp
This way, the old callsign can still be looked up and will point to the same station as the new one.
Just deleting all the expired calls will mean that info about the addresses they have is lost, and when I finally receive the message about callsign change it has to be found from archives. When there would be a way to get the callsign changes from an authoritative source, I would just apply all changes in the manner shown above and delete all expired calls for which there is no new assignment.
Rob