Dear all, (apologies for duplicates) Today is the 21st of September. As such, the RIPE NCC will proceed to delete the set of person/role objects detailed in my previous announcements from the RIPE Database. Please see the URL http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/orphaned.html for information on the details of the objects to be deleted. The following is an outline of the process we will be using: 1. Stop updating the database on Friday, 21, at 18:00 CEST. 2. Remove all person objects according to the criteria: - maintained _only_ by DE domain resellers and not referenced - not maintained and not referenced This will take ~15 hours 3. Next day, on Saturday restart the server with the new database. 4. Resume the updates. As you can see, this process will result in period of a few hours during which UPDATE/ADDITION/DELETION messages sent to the RIPE Database will not be processed immediately, but rather stored for later processing. Queries will be serviced by our hot spare machine. Users will not notice any downtime on that part of the service. The length of the outage is directly related to the number of objects to be deleted (more than 2 million) and the need to use special processes to finalise the process in a reasonable time. Further to this deletion, and in order to avoid replication of the current situation after this deletion process, incoming messages containing person and role objects originating from domain name related activities will NOT be processed. The RIPE NCC will contact any source of such messages in order to clear any possible misunderstandings. Hoping to have informed you well, Joao Luis Silva Damas Chief Technical Officer RIPE NCC