Dear all, First of all, it is recommended for everybody to read the *whole* announcement. I have just put the new RIPE database whois server in production. The new server has a couple of new features (and bug fixes): - twice the speed for any classless lookups - the lookup algoritm is changed such that: Matyas Matyas can finally be found and also Daniel David hasn't problems anymore with finding himself in the database - email addresses in the person objects are now also indexed and can thus be used as a search key from now on. - unlimited number of matches allowed. You can now find all Davids in the RIPE database And then the *BONUS* feature (made in France during my vacation!): - Inverse lookup has been implemented, that is: $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -T limerick -i author MN131 will give you all limericks written by Mike Norris (as long as his NIC handle is used, else try the same search with 'Mike Norris' as the key) $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -T route -i origin AS3333 will give you all routes with origin AS AS3333 (this makes the ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/as/db directories obsolete, and they will thus be removed) Also a comma separated list can be used as in: $ whois -h whois.ripe.net -i admin-c,tech-c,zone-c DK13-RIPE which will give you all objects that reference myself as an admin-c, tech-c or zone-c. You can use the following attributes for inverse lookups: admin-c as-exclude author as-in as-list as-out comm-list default interas-in interas-out localas mnt-by mnt-lower mnt-nfy nserver notify origin peer rev-srv tech-c zone-c Furthermore, the RIPE whois client program has been updated to support the new options (I finally got the chance to do some C coding ;-)). The program is now packaged with some other small C programs for use in conjunction with the RIPE database: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/tools/ripe-whois-tools-2.0.tar.gz (perl versions will be packaged together with the new release of the database software, when the updating code is also ready) You will also need to upgrade the prtraceroute in case you use this program (ftp://ftp.ripe.net/pride/tools/prtraceroute-2.0beta6.tar.gz). (see also separate announcement). Finally an important note to software developers: The whois server now returns objects always in the following sequence: newline object/message newline object/message newline newline (The newline at the start is new) This change allowed for more consistency and faster code. However, I am willing to make an ugly fix in case too many tools cannot handle this corectly and need updates. Please let me know if this is indeed needed. As always: please send bug reports directly to me and I will fix the problem. Kind regards, David Kessens RIPE NCC ---- RIPE whois tools 2.0 This is a set of C programs (perl versions of the same programs are available in the RIPE database distribution) to be used in conjunction with the RIPE database. It contains the following programs: - whois The RIPE version of the whois client program. This is intended for European users as it will query a RIPE whois server with extended whois capabilities rather than a standard whois protocol server. The whois program is fully compatible with the standard whois protocol and can thus replace your default whois program. This program is aware of quite some extra flags that the standard whois doesn't support. Just try 'whois' without arguments to see an explanation of these. Please note that most of these flags are NOT supported by non RIPE whois servers. In cases where you use this client to query non RIPE whois servers, you should not use any of these flags. - networkupdate A program that allows updating the RIPE database with the whois protocol instead of the usual E-mail interface. This program can usually only be used by the administrators of the whois server itself. The updating mechanism is too powerfull (for now) to allow the general public to use this mechanism. The server is protected by means of an accesslist. - cryptpw Calculate a crypted password with given password and salt. This password can then be used in the 'auth:' field of maintainer objects. -----