Dear Local Registries Contacts, Thuesday oct 31 between 20.00 and 24.00, the RIPE NCC suffered a disk crash. The harddisk involved contained most of the data used for day-to-day operations, the maillist aliases (needed to contact you :-( and the mail spool directory. People who tried to contact us today may have found that they were unable to reach us. We apologise for any inconvienence caused by this; unfortunately, rebuilding the disk from backups took considerable time. Unfortunately we couldn't avoid any data loss. Mail that has been sent or processed between 12:00-24:00 at October 31st might be lost. We would appreciate if you could resent any mail you sent/received to/from us during this period with the line RESEND in the subject field. We will investigate our sendmail logs tomorrow and contact you directly if we can find traces of possible lost mail. As the RIPE NCC manager explained at the last RIPE meeting we are currently investigating the use of other hardware solutions to avoid this kind of problems in the future. Unfortunately, these plans had not materialized in time to prevent yesterday's incident. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at: <ncc@ripe.net> Kind regards, Geert Jan de Groot David Kessens RIPE NCC