alc tests

Hi Marten,

> 
> 
> Folks,
> 
> Today and tomorrow (I'm off on Friday) I will be playing with alc. We
> have got a server running on whois.ripe.net, port 7667, with currently
> only the RIPE database loaded. Although I have seen it dump core a few
> times, I think most of these were actually caused by wrong
> modifications to the config file by me. Some early feedback and things
> to think about [these are mainly operational things]:
> 
> - the RIPE database supports immediate updates in the whois server.
> People that send in ASs or networks want to test whether they have
> done things right almost instantly. Restarting alc every minute or so
> is currently the only answer, but with 40 seconds to read the RIPE
> database, this does not look very attractive to me. We may need to
> think of a way to have alc show a similar behaviour as updating the
> database (ie almost instantly)

We've been thinking about this also. In fact it was one of the problems
we had even with the "translator" prior to alc.
> 
> - When a DB file is read as a flat file, the alc process is enormously
> big, almost 15 Mb with only the RIPE database read. This could give
> some severe performance problems for other services running on the
> same machine. The answer is simple I know, get another box, but we
> don't have another box. Reading a DBM index in stead of a flat file
> reduces the size of alc to around 7 Mb.
> 
> - aggwalk is works against the test alc server we have running
> 
> - aggwalk -A <attribute> only shows real attributes as defined in the
> config, no aliases. So in the RIPE alc server you cannot ask for
> aut-sys but have to ask for homeas ...
> 
> That's all for now, I'll get back with more later.
> 
> -Marten

Thanks for the feedback and have a good day off.
         --Elise



-------- Logged at  Wed Apr 27 15:09:03 MET DST 1994  ---------