Dear list members, The addition of NIC handles to the person objects that do not have one already successfully and smoothly completed. NIC handles are added to 31981 person objects. The process began at 19:00 and ended at 23:30, CET. Thanks for your cooperation by not sending huge updates while the addition process was in progress. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any questions. Kind regards, Engin Gunduz RIPE NCC DB Group Joao Luis Silva Damas wrote:

Dear all,

as discussed and agreed to during discussions in the mailing lists and at the RIPE Meeting in Vienna, the RIPE NCC will be adding newly generated NIC handles to person objects that do not currently have one.

Over the last days we have been testing the procedures to do this in a non-disruptive way.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the current database, the process needs about 5 hours to run. Due to this and to avoid interactions with nightly jobs that create several copies of the files, including the ftp site and the full text search indexes, we will stop updates tomorrow Tuesday at 19:00 (Amsterdam time).

This will cause all updates to the DB sent after 19:00 to be queued for later processing that night. There is no need to send updates more than once.

Queries will not be affected. That is, the whois server will keep answering queries normally.

During the process, objects without nic handles will get unique new ones and also a "changed" attribute will be added with tomorrow's data and ripe-dbm@ripe.net as the author of the change. This is for future reference.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards, Joao Damas DB Group RIPE NCC