Hi WG, The documentation unequivocally states the value of the "pingable" attribute in route[6] objects must include a prefix length: $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -- -v route [...] pingable Allows a network operator to advertise an IP address of a node that should be reachable from outside networks. This node can be used as a destination address for diagnostic tests. The IP address must be within the address range of the prefix containing this attribute. An address prefix is represented as an IPv4 address followed by the character slash "/" followed by an integer in the range from 0 to 32. The following are valid address prefixes: 128.9.128.5/32, 128.9.0.0/16, 0.0.0.0/0; and the following address prefixes are invalid: 0/0, 128.9/16 since 0 or 128.9 are not strings containing four integers. $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -- -v route6 [...] pingable Allows a network operator to advertise an IP address of a node that should be reachable from outside networks. This node can be used as a destination address for diagnostic tests. The IP address must be within the address range of the prefix containing this attribute. <ipv6-address>/<prefix> Therefore I added mine as /32 and /128. That ended up in me getting complaints that I broke some people's scripts, which were assuming that value of this attribute should be a "bare" IP address. (For example: http://ip.v6net.ru/archives/1764) Contradictory to what the documentation says, the e-mail robot happily accepted my update to remove the prefix length. So hopefully people's scripts are unbroken now. This sparked my curiosity, though: - What exactly is the purpose of the prefix length? - How should one interpret a value that has a prefix length other than /32 (in "route" objects) or /128 (in "route6" objects)? - Why does the documentation say it is mandatory when it clearly is not? - And finally, am I really the only LIR hostmaster in the RIPE that actually do RTFM? :-) $ curl -s ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ripe.db.route{,6}.gz | zgrep -c '^pingable:.*/' 0 Tore