Adding nic handles to objects without one

Dear all,

as discussed and agreed to during discussions in the mailing lists and at the 
RIPE Meeting in Vienna, the RIPE NCC will be adding newly generated NIC 
handles to person objects that do not currently have one.

Over the last days we have been testing the procedures to do this in a 
non-disruptive way.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the current database, the process needs 
about 5 hours to run.
Due to this and to avoid interactions with nightly jobs that create several 
copies of the files, including the ftp site and the full text search indexes, 
we will stop updates tomorrow Tuesday at 19:00 (Amsterdam time).

This will cause all updates to the DB sent after 19:00 to be queued for later 
processing that night. There is no need to send updates more than once.

Queries will not be affected. That is, the whois server will keep answering 
queries normally.

During the process, objects without nic handles will get unique new ones and 
also a "changed" attribute will be added with tomorrow's data and 
ripe-dbm at ripe.net as the author of the change. This is for future reference.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,
Joao Damas
DB Group
RIPE NCC