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 -------------------------------------------------- for, and on behalf of, the RIPE NCC Database Group.