* denis@ripe.net

Unfortunately no dump will help you with this process. The "changed:" attribute is almost useless. For what you want to do it IS useless. The syntax requires all objects to have at least one mandatory "changed:" attribute. The user can set the date to almost anything. It can be tomorrow or ten years ago. When the object is changed, there is no requirement to make any changes to this date or add any additional "changed:" attributes. It is user generated and only has meaning to the user. What you want to do would only work if these were auto generated timestamps by the update software. But that is not the case.

That may be so. But to turn it around - are you of the opinion that the LIRs to a great extent are deliberately supplying incorrect changed dates? If "no", it would be good enough for me, really. For my uses, an approximation will suffice. To be honest, I would actually be more concerned about the number being wrong because of LIRs assigning addresses to their customers without registering the assignments in the database, than I would be about LIRs registering their assignments, but with incorrect dates. BTW - the update software *does* generate time stamps. At least, I always send only my e-mail address, the bot does the rest. Tore