Report: whois DB problems

Dear all,

as you may be aware yesterday afternoon there was a power outage at about
14:30 in the machine room which hosts our servers at the AMS-IX.

As a result of this, when power was recovered, we found that the main
filesystem where the RIPE DB is located was corrupted beyond hope.

Whois query service was promptly moved to a backup mirror machine located
elsewhere. This machine has an up to date copy of the RIPE DB and is able
to serve queries, although at a slower pace than the main server.

Updates where queued until a full restore was completed and general sanity
checking performed to ensure a complete restore of all pieces was in place,
at about 1:00 am on Dec 14th 1999.

Unfortunately, earlier today, the main server has unexplainably stopped
operations and required a reboot, resulting in a service outage of about 15
minutes (time for the DNS to propagate data about the backup server).

We are extremely sorry for all the inconvenience and are carrying a
thorough analysis if the events in order to shorten outages should this
kind if events happen again.

Best regards,
Joao Damas
=====================================================
| Joao Luis Silva Damas       http://www.ripe.net   |
| RIPE DB Group Manager       email: joao at ripe.net  |
| RIPE NCC                                          |
| Amsterdam                                         |
=====================================================