Dear Colleagues,
I shall begin by saying that I wrote the two messages to
the local-ir, lir-wg and db-wg yesterday. I wrote them
for, and on behalf of, the RIPE NCC Database Group. I
realise that many of you are unhappy that these messages
had no personal signature. The responsibility for this
oversight is mine. In all previous postings to these lists,
I have signed my name. I shall continue to do this.
You already know what happened on Tuesday, 27 October, last.
Yesterday morning, we had no option but to do preventative
maintenance of the database; this was not related to the
activity of any user last Tuesday. However, nearly all
updates were stopped until around 1630 MET. Unfortunately,
there was a higher than usual number of updates sent to the
database yesterday. These two facts had one result: a very
long delay before your updates were processed. At this time
there is still a long queue of unprocessed updates, but updates
are being processed again. Obviously, a faster, more powerful
machine would process updates quicker than the current machine.
On Tuesday, the problem was that it was possible to delete objects
referenced somewhere in the database before deleting all references
to that object. Imposing such a constraint (referential integrity
check) has been already been considered. Tuesday's incident was
not a security problem - anyone with the correct authorization can
still make a mistake.
At the previous RIPE meeting in Edinburgh, we announced new
software, including a referential integrity check, and new
hardware, a Sun E450 machine. We intended to deploy both of
these at the end of October or early November. We had bad
luck that several unrelated problems occurred this week, just
before the planned deployment of the new code and the new
machine.
Now, a status report. All your updates have been queued -
there is no need to re-send them. We estimate that the
situation should be back to normal tomorrow, if not sooner.
We still plan to introduce the new software and hardware
next week.
We thank you all for your support in the past and we assure
you of our continuing efforts to support you in your work.
Your sincerely,
Ambrose Magee
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for, and on behalf of, the RIPE NCC Database Group.
