March 2000 - db-wg - mailman.ripe.net

<auto-dbm@ripe.net> is slow this afternoon.
by RIPE Database Administration 16 May '18

16 May '18

Dear Colleagues, Because of a very high level of use this afternoon, the response time of <auto-dbm(a)ripe.net> is longer than normal. I have made contact with those who are responsible and I expect the situation to improve as the machine works through the queue. Please be patient. Obviously we at the RIPE NCC Database Group are continuously working to make the performance of the database as good as possible. However, we cannot make improvements in zero time. We thank you for your co-operation up to now and we ask for your continued co-operation so that everyone receives the best possible service. If you have anymore questions, please contact <ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net>. Regards, Ambrose Magee ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration.

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RIPE Database main server up and running again
by RIPE Database Administration 28 Mar '00

28 Mar '00

Dear All, Thank you for your patience. The RIPE Database main server is now up and running again. The queue of updates is being processed, but please take into account that it will take several hours to clear the queue. Technical details: The failure of one of the memory modules of the server caused a parity error, thus forcing the kernel to panic. The memory module had to be replaced and tested. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact <ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net>. Regards, Daniele Arena ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration.

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Whois service running on a backup server
by RIPE Database Administration 28 Mar '00

28 Mar '00

Dear Colleagues, Unfortunately this morning the main RIPE Whois server experienced a hardware crash. We switched the service to a backup server; thus you may find that the response time for whois queries is longer than usual. The updates are currently not being processed, but they are queued; they will be processed as soon as the main server is up and running again. There is no need to resend your updates. We are currently working to repair the hardware damage on the main server, and we hope to return to the normal situation as soon as possible. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact <ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net>. Regards, Daniele Arena ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration. P.S.: Apologies if you receive this mail more than once.

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New DB release 2.3.1
by RIPE Database Administration 21 Mar '00

21 Mar '00

Dear colleagues, We have made available the new release of RIPE Perl database software at our fto site. You can find it at ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/software/ripe-dbase-2.3.2.tar.gz Please find attached notes of the new release. Please note that CLIENTADDRESS type of referral can be used in our production server readily. Best regards, RIPE NCC DB Group ----------------- RELEASE NOTES for RIPE Database 2.3.2 This is mainly a bugfix release, without major new features added. There are also a few maintenance and performance-related changes, and an important security fix. SUPPORTED SYSTEMS This release has been tested with perl 5.00502 on BSDI3.1 and perl 5.00404 on Solaris 2.6 systems. Please let us know if you have problems running it on other systems. NEW FEATURES - New type of referral: CLIENTADDRESS o A fourth kind of referral is defined, CLIENTADDRESS (The other three were RIPE, INTERNIC and SIMPLE). o The IP address of the client is sent to the referred whois server, if the referral type is CLIENTADDRESS. o The IP address is sent using the -V flag. The version and the IP address will be separated by a comma (eg, -Vripe2.3.1,193.140.45.45). o No other flag will be forwarded to the referred whois server. o When the server gets such a request, it checks the IP number of the server which does the referral against a list of authorized whois servers. If it is not in the list, it will be rejected. The list is named AUTHORIZEDFORREFERRAL in the configuration. o Then, the IP address of the client is extracted from the -V flag string and it will be regarded as if it is the IP address of a directly querying whois client (ie, it is checked against the list of DENYWHOISACCESS list). MAINTENANCE RELATED CHANGES - Introduced some debugging functionality: WHOISDSTAT - creation of files describing the activity of whoisd query processes. Those are normally deleted if the whoisd exits the normal way. WHOISDSTAT is a base filename for those files. - Introduced some limitation on bad clients: QUERYLOOPLIMIT defines a limit for '-k' connections. If more than so many queries for the same search term are detected, QUERYLOOPTXT is printed and the connection is closed. Mainly meant to protect against ptraceroute parsing broken as-macros. SECURITY FIXES - On February 2, 2000, we got a report for a possible buffer overflow in whoisd. An extremely long and specific query, such as the following: % whois `perl -e '{print "0." x 20000}'`(a)joshua.ripe.net (query example from a Linux host; it does not work, of course, if the client has built-in query size limits) caused the forked server process to crash with a segmentation fault. We immediately introduced a patch on whoisd.pl, truncating the queries to 255 characters immediately after they were being read. BUG FIXES - cross-misc: now the sender of cross-notifications is set to HUMAILBOX. - whoisd.pl: o the text for DENIED connection was mistakenly printed on STDOUT. o The timeout handler would wait infinitely to print a msg about closing the connection. Now an alarm has been set up to stop it, the message can be printed to WHOISDSTAT file if active. PERFORMANCE FIXES - addkey: The overflow file handling has been modified, so that it would use a smaller amount of memory.

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Top 100 Maintainers List 20000314
by RIPE Database Administration 14 Mar '00

14 Mar '00

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Charter? Does anybody have a copy
by Nigel Titley 07 Mar '00

07 Mar '00

Gentlefolk, At the last RIPE conference I made the mistake of putting up my hand and offering Wilfried help in putting the paperwork of the DB WG in order. One of the first things I'd like to sort out is the group charter. Does anybody have a copy? It probably needs some work doing on it by now, but if we've got an old one, at least it will be a start. Thanks Nigel -- Tel: +44 171 864 4450 Fax: +44 171 864 4488 Well I'm disenchanted too. We're all disenchanted (James Thurber) (http://www.seanet.com/~thurber/disenchanted.gif)

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RE: DB consistancy checking tools
by Matthew Robinson 07 Mar '00

07 Mar '00

I won't be at RIPE-35 as my first child is due at the same time but I'll definitely knock something together as a draft. If other people are interested then things should go ahead at RIPE-35 otherwise I do have permission from my wife to attend RIPE-36 ;-) Kind regards Matthew -----Original Message----- From: Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet [mailto:woeber@cc.univie.ac.at] Sent: 20 January 2000 14:55 To: matthew(a)planet.net.uk Cc: lir-wg(a)ripe.net; db-wg(a)ripe.net; woeber(a)cc.univie.ac.at Subject: RE: DB consistancy checking tools Matthew, I think this is an interesting proposal: >I have been wondering recently whether a separate group should be set up for >the sole purpose of creating tools/advise/methods/hints 'n' tips for LIR's >to keep on top of their entries and make management easier. A sort of RIPE >users working group not concerned with designing objects for the database >but how to put existing objects in it, remove them, manage them, etc. > >My 2c > >Matthew To start things moving, could you come up with a coarse draft of ideas and short-term goals to take up? On the more formal side, one of the possible solutions to accomodate that activity might be to create a TaskForce to work on well-defined items during RIPE35 (do you intend to particpate?). This TF might be supported by both LIR and DB, or sponsored by whichever group is seen to be appropriate... Wilfried.

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Re: DB consistancy checking tools
by mediaWays Hostmaster 06 Mar '00

06 Mar '00

Hi, we do whois -h whois.ripe.net -r -m <our Allocation/16> | grep inetnum | sed "s/inetnum: //" | sed "s/ - /./" > <some file> for our Allocations once a month and analyse this with awk script #!/usr/bin/sh nawk -F. 'BEGIN{summe=0} NF==8 { for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) byte[i]=$i; if(byte[3]!=byte[7]) { size=(byte[7]-byte[3])*256; if(byte[4]>byte[8]) size-=byte[8]-byte[4]; else size+=byte[8]+byte[4]; size++; } else { size=byte[8]-byte[4]+1; } summe+=size; printf("%s: %d IPs\n", $0, size); } END{printf("Summe %ld\n", summe);}' < <some file> so we could calculate the #IPs, check overlappings, check our own IP-DB against it ... and so on. We hope that this querys do not bother the RIPE-DB ;-) Kind Regards, _____________________________ Stephan Mankopf +49 5241 80 88729 stephan.mankopf(a)mediaways.net

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Attn. NRTM clients: Missing serial files(2)
by RIPE Database Manager 29 Feb '00

29 Feb '00

Dear Colleagues, The message that was sent to you concerning the missing serial files contains an unfortunate misprint: the number of missing serial files is 605, not 30605 as was reported. The missing range is 8929802-8930406. Again, sorry for trouble and inconvenience. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact <ripe-dbm(a)ripe.net> Regards, Andrei Robachevsky ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration.

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