Dear colleagues, To improve the quality of our service, we decided to report on reindexing of our database, and other maintenance issues. We will continue to do this if the community thinks this is a good idea. Next weekend, 10-11 February 2001, RIPE NCC will reindex the person objects in RIPE whois database. This is a usual maintenance practice, performed once every three weeks. The reindexing will start at 2:00am Saturday, and is expected to last around 40 hours, due to the very high number of person objects in our database. During the reindexing, it won't be possible to update, delete, or create person objects. The messages containing person objects will be queued. Any person object in an update message to <auto-dbm@ripe.net> will cause the whole update message to be blocked until the reindexing process finishes. Thus, we suggest our users not to put person objects in a message that contains other types of objects. Reindexing will not be needed in version 3 of our database software. You can see a schedule for this and other maintainance issues at: http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/DBstatus.html This page will be updated regularly. We apologize for any inconvenience the maintenance may cause. If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to contact <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. Regards, Engin Gunduz ____________________________ RIPE Database Administration.