As has been reported earlier this year, the RIPE NCC is currently severely under-resourced. As a consequence, it has been impossible for us to report to you formally and in full about the activities of the RIPE NCC as we have done in the past. While we very much regret the situation we hope to keep you informed with a series of short informal reports. The report below summarises our activities up to July 1995. Summary The registration services still operate at capacity. We are hiring new personnel to cope with this. We have started the training courses for new local Internet registries. A new tool for speeding up reverse domain delegations is now in use. Database improvements are being implemented. We are implementing a request tracking system. Work on next year's charging scheme is behind schedule and progressing slowly. Registration Services (hostmaster) The backlog in registration services has been more or less constant at around 125 messages which equals about 70 requests. We have hired 2.6 FTE of junior hostmasters to help cope with this problem. The current expectation is that this backlog will be cleared during September. Training We have taught the first Local Internet Registry course in Amsterdam. It has been well received. We are currently revising the course according to the excellent feedback received. More courses are scheduled in Germany (full), Austria, the UK, Italy, and at the NCC in Amsterdam. The dates will be announced as soon as they are fixed. If you would like to host such a course and a minimum of six contributing Local IRs are likely to attend, please contact training@ripe.net to see whether we can accomodate you. All courses will be announced on the local-ir mailing list and are open to all contributing registries on a first come first served basis. If there is high demand for a particular course we will have to restrict the number of persons from each registry. Reverse Domain Delegations There is a new mail responder tool at <auto-inaddr@ripe.net> which automatically checks delegation requests for reverse domains, e.g. subdomains of 193.in-addr.arpa and 194.in-addr.arpa. Requests are only forwarded to registration services staff after they have passed all checks. This reduces turnaround times and relieves the registration services staff at the same time. Database We are working on database software enhancements in the areas of hierarchical authorisation and logging/exchange. The former will be a means to authorise creation of objects below a node in a hierarchical key space (domain names, addresses). The main application is to prevent erroneous registration of address space assignments. The improvements in logging will make it possible to run real time secondary copies of databases. Staffing Els Willems has started as new junior hostmaster on July 3rd. She joins us from the Dutch foundation for computer algebra. Els will work part time 4days/week initially reducing to 3days/week later in the year. Unfortunately (for us) Anne Lord will leave us on July 14th and move back to her home country for new challenges at a major service provider. We at the NCC will miss her and her contribution to our success. We hope that Anne can join us at the next RIPE meeting for a 'formal' farewell from the RIPE community. We will advertise to fill Anne's position shortly. In the meantime our UK contingent will be replenished by Nick Reid who has been hired as a full time junior hostmaster. Nick will start August 28th. As reported in Rome we have also hired Hatice Kuey from Turkey as a junior hostmaster. The expectation was that she would join us in June. Unfortunately and unknown to us at the time, Dutch employment laws have changed in April, making it much harder to employ people from outside the EC. We are currently working with the Dutch employment authorities to resolve this. Given the increasing amount of new registries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East we think it is very important to have this area 'represented' in our staff. Plans for this month Registration services urgently need the improvement of our ticketing system into a real request tracking system. Currently the needed functionality is being specified and we hope to start implementation this month with a gradual phase-in of new functionality. We plan to issue a basic proposal for next years charging model. Due to the staff shortage and pressure on registration services not much work has been done to date. The proposal is thus expected to be simple and basic. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Regards Daniel Karrenberg RIPE NCC Manager