Folks, As you may have guessed, we have put quite some work over the last few months into getting the RIPE database classless. We currently have a beta implementation running, with the idea that we will switch to this software shortly after the RIPE meeting. We would like you to have a look at the whois server we currently have running on my workstation rijp.ripe.net. If you have some time, please fire off some queries to this machine to see if the server responds like you would expect it to respond. A few things: - the new server is slightly slower than the current one. This mainly because of the classless lookups, and the fact that the database is no longer kept in one file, but seperate files per object type, each with their own index. Also the server uses data on a remote file system. - although the server supports more and less specific lookups for networks, the current client you may have will not support this. A new client will be given out as soon as this has been properly tested at the NCC. - you can now specify network lookups of the forms: 192.87.45.1 192.87.45.1/32 ie host addresses are recognized, and prefix/length lookups are recognized. The old style queries like "128.141" are still supported as well. - the default behaviour for network queries is that the server will give an exact match if available or the first less specific match for this query. So for host or subnet queries, the server will output the classful network mostly. - the test database is aligned with the real database for most of the data. We have also put in quite some test data like the ripe-81 routes and some inet-rtr objects. Please use this database only for testing, not for authoritative output. Because we are still working on all this, the new objects may sometimes show up and sometimes not. - we have also generated objects for the class C blocks that we have delegated to local IRs. So, for queries of non-assigned numbers, you should get the class C block they come out of. Basically we would like to get an idea from you that we have not changed the look and feel of the server in a way that may cause tools you may have that use the whois server to fail. If you find any problems, please direct them to me personally. Cheers, -Marten PS Please note you have to do: whois -h rijp.ripe.net <query> to get the new database software to respond.