In 2014 and 2016 I tried to contact all the users that had previously requested addresses,
and asked them if they wanted to keep them. Most addresses in the list at that time were
assigned in the days of IP over packet radio, from about 1987 to the early 2000's, and likely
not many were still in use. So I did a big cleanup at that time.
You are right: it is a lot of work. I retrieved mail addresses from the archived request mails
as far as still available, mailed to call@amsat.org, call@veron.nl, call@vrza.nl and still I did
not get reply from many of them. Those were mostly deleted.
In the past it was possible to download a list of valid callsigns from our radio authority, and
I used to download it weekly and check which callsigns were de-registered and had IP assignments,
which I then deleted. But "for privacy reasons" this is no longer available and it has become
more difficult again to keep the list clean.

Another frequent issue is that hams get help from someone else in setting up the station, they
together perform tasks like requesting an address and configuring it in the equipment, but
the main operator himself has no clue how it is working. When they later receive a mail from
me with a request to perform some change, even something like a new OpenVPN certificate
because we switched to a new server, I get no reply or an indication that they have to ask someone
else and that it may take some time. A task like replace a .ovpn file by another may take several
months to implement.
That will probably be a hurdle too when cleanup operations via something like the new portal are
being performed.

Rob

On 12/21/22 21:41, Neil Johnson via 44net wrote:

About seven years ago I wrote some python scripts for Brian that took the full ampr.org DNS zone file and:

Pulled out all the call signs.

Checked if the IP address related to the call signs had an entry in the portal database.

For those call signs that weren't in the portal database, I attempted to see if the call sign was still active by checking QRZ.com or the latest (at that time) Radio Amateur Call book ("The flying horse") database.

The goal was to try to find an e-mail address and contact the amateur operator to see if they still needed the allocation.

At the time over 35% of the callsigns (~14K) were not found in either database.

There were many entries that did not have e-mail addresses (mostly ones from Europe that were redacted due to privacy laws).

Brian decided that with so many unknowns it wasn't worth proceeding.

-Neil N0SFH