RIPE Database software Version 2.1 is now available from: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/software/ripe-dbase-2.1.tar.gz The release notes are included below. There a some new features including a new installation procedure and conversion to perl5. Please let us know if you have problems. Replies to <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. Regards, Chris Fletcher - RIPE NCC RELEASE NOTES for RIPE Database 2.1 SUPPORTED SYSTEMS This release has been tested with perl5.00401 on bsdi2.1 and GNU/linux systems. Please let us know if you have problems running it on other systems. FEATURES When an update sends an acknowledgement and a notification to the same mail address one or the other can be suppressed see SUPPRESSMESS in the config file. New concise format for acknowledgements and notifications. '-v' provides detailed object descriptions. Re-implemented Makefiles and package configuration for ease of use. Includes an 'uninstall' target to carefully remove the executable and libraries when upgrading. Now two help files, one about the whois interface delivered by whois and one about the mail interface delivered by mail. Notifications are sent when an object is created with a notify: attrib. Whole package runs under perl5.004 with DB_File interface to Berkley db. Perl5 hides a lot of platform specific things from scripts so various configuration options have been made obsolete and removed. DB_File allows you to increase the size of the in memory db file cache which greatly improves indexing performance. see DBCACHESIZE We have not tried it with other DBM packages but it should not be hard to change if you want to use GDBM_File. This could become a configuration option (or maybe use AnyDBM_File) if there is demand for it. Changed syntax of 'changed:' & 'withdrawn:' to allow a 4 digits in the year part of the date (8 digits in total rather than 6). Automatically added dates are 8 digits. Existing 6 digit date fields are left unchanged. BUG FIXES added word boundary matches to subject line parsing now matches 'new object' and not 'My Apple Newton'. added 'i' to regexp check of MAIL-FROM so is not case-sensitive changed code to match comments in ripedb.config won't log incoming serial updates to files if SERIALINCOMINGDIR is not defined. MISC Added copyright message to all source files to better assert our rights but licence has not changed from previous versions. I have had problems with bitwise operations on the large integers used to represent IP addresses. With some versions of perl5 a bitwise '&' returns a signed result. This causes classless lookups to fail. See comments about iprightzeromask in misc.pl. It seems to work with perl5.00401 Changes to ripedb.config The following values have been removed... HELP (replaced by WHOISHELP & AUTODBMHELP) RENICECMD (optional - will use setpriority(2) if not set) The following values have been added... WHOISHELP AUTODBMHELP ATTDESC OBJDESC DBCACHESIZE SUCCESSTXT HELPHEADER FAILURETXT