New/Revised RIPE Document Announcement -------------------------------------- A revised/new document is available from the RIPE document store. Ref: ripe-135 Title: RIPE NCC Quarterly Report Q1-1996 Author: Daniel Karrenberg, Carol Orange Date: 19 April 1996 Format: PS=534649 TXT=83751 Obsoletes: Obsoleted by: Updates: ripe-116 Updated by: See also: Summary ------- The Q1-1996 Quarterly In this report, we aim to inform the RIPE community in general and the RIPE NCC Contributors Committee in particular of our activities during the first quarter of 1996 and our plans for the next one. Due to the severe resource shortage we experienced in the last couple of years the series of quarterly reports had to be interrupted for two years. This report represents a new start at the series with a revised and improved format. We welcome any com- ments and suggestions to further improve the useful- less of these reports. Management Summary The European Internet keeps growing. 66 new local Internet registries started operations during Q1-1996. This is more than one per working day and again more than foreseen. During Q1-1996 alone, we manually handled 9,173 messages and automatically handled 21,653 messages that were sent to the RIPE NCC role mailboxes. Registration services continued to operate normally, albeit with an increasing backlog due to factors including increased demand and some hostmaster staff leaving unexpectedly. We have successfully hired very promising replacements for the hostmasters who left us. We continued gathering hostcounts, provid- ing local registry courses and information services on the Internet. Significant activities during the quarter were the beta release of an improved RIPE database software package, implementation and initial deployment of the new request tracking system for part of the man- ually handled messages, continuing work on the a new WWW site as well as analysis and reduction of redun- dant routing information originated by European autonomous systems. Also the long expected business manager has started. The financial situation is very healthy with 60% of this year's planned expenditure already received in revenue. During Q1-1996 we have further consolidated current activities. We also consider it significant that after a long time we succeeded to start a new tech- nical activity, reacting quickly to a requirement from the RIPE community. We made plans for re- structuring of the systems and software area within the NCC and obtained authorisation from TERENA to hire staff to strengthen this area as well as one additional hostmaster in registration services. During Q2-1996 significant activities will include training of new hostmaster staff, more training courses for local Internet registries, development and deployment of hierarchical authorisation for the RIPE database, completion of the ripe-104++ document on local IR policies, launching of the new WWW site and the (re)start of more technical activities. Strategically we observe that the Internet is cur- rently changing too quickly for stringent 12 month planning cycles. We will make efforts to adapt more quickly to these changes. We expect to propose changes to the 1996 NCC budget during the next quar- ter. Considering the rapidly changing environment it sup- ports and operates in, the RIPE NCC is healthy and functioning well. FTP Access ---------- All RIPE documents and Internet RFC`s are available via anonymous FTP from host ftp.ripe.net. Type "ftp ftp.ripe.net". Login with username "anonymous" supplying your email address as the password. 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