Week 1 Status Report

Hi--

  What a great week!  Andy and Rick have got the db up and mostly
running on a Sun, and partially on an RS-6000.  The first round went
*extremely* smoothly (as you suggested, Daniel).  It got a bit rockier
after we got past the pre-packaged code and into guardians, but that is
progressing, too.  We've got prtraceroute working off our whois, and
showing the local data we've entered.

  The accounts you set up for us on whois.ripe.net proved useful in
trying to figure the connections between the AS* accounts and the
locations of the guardian files, and in letting us confirm to ourselves
that the parts of the code we were looking at in our distribution
weren't back-level.

  We are running (mostly) your ftp-able beta release, plus the
individual files you've mailed us.  We may be getting close to where
someone needs to evaluate that:  how up-to-date with your production
system should we try to be.  (For instance, the syntax for GUARD lines
in the beta conf file is wrong though it's commented out and though you
gave us the correct syntax in the message this morning (blush);  it
took a bit of perl diving to notice that).  We're a few years behind
you in PERL expertise here-- we've written some little things, but
nothing in a managed environment like you're using (/bin, /lib, etc),
so we could use some pointers on how you actually go about developing
on this code.  I found references to $opt_v, but no &Getopts.  Do you
edit "$opt_v=1;" into the code to debug?  Or use the debugger?  Do you
have a separate development library directory for each developer?  With
what directory structure?  You seem to share checked-in version with
RCS.  If we do get into serious joint development, you may want to let
us know more about your development procedures so we can stay parallel
with you.

  For early next week, we'll probably try to become expert users (at
least) of the external interfaces:  interpreting prtraceroute and
prcheck, entering good and bad data, etc.  I think we are very close to
the time that we could ask some North American friends if they'd supply
us with filled-in RIPE templates for us to test with;  and possibly not
very many days away from where we can just ask them to use RIPE
procedures directly on our copy of RIPE.

  We still need to resolve the "exchanging databases" problem, though
from what we've seen in the code it looks like you may have this all
solved in advance all ready.  (?)  If we exchange ftps of the
database.db files once per night and put them in the correct place, is
that totally sufficient to make prtraceroute work on a combined image?
Are there similar issues that you can think of that we need to resolve
before announce availability of the conbined service?

  The help you've given us getting this up has been really wonderful.
We're looking forward to working closely as things progress.  Thanks
enormously.

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Mon Feb 21 09:01:32 MET 1994  ---------