Week 1 Status Report

Hi Dale (and others),

Glad things went allright to start with. Now, I'll try and answer the
many questions you asked below ...

"Dale S. Johnson" <dsj at merit.edu> writes
 * 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.

Good.

 *   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

Well yes. I advice in the beta stuff to stay away from guarded
attributes. It is only now that we started to use it heavily that I
feel like it is properly working. I'll change the beta conf.

 * 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

Well, we are supposed to have proper debugging in each runnable
module, but every here and there I never put Getopts in. That is the
places where you would find hardcoded $opt_v or $opt_d. All this is on
the list to go.

 * 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.

Ok, let me try and explain what we have here. We have 3 different
database trees on ns.ripe.net. You can have a look if you wish. The 3
trees are: /nccfs3/dbase (production version), /nccfs3/testdb (test
version) and /nccfs3/newdb (development version). The distribution is
built from the development version. We all (well mostly Tony and me)
work on the same sources, and use rcs for locking and version control.

 *   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.

Sounds great.

 *   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?

prtraceroute basically works on the combined data. We provide Alternet
data as a test in our server, and prtraceroute knows what to do with
it. Mirroring the database is by far the easiest for now.

 * Are there similar issues that you can think of that we need to resolve
 * before announce availability of the conbined service?

Not sure. Maybe Daniel knows some things. I'd make sure you test the
whole stuff thoroughly before announcing anything.

 *   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.

You are welcome. You owe us some bugs (and a beer perhaps ;-)

-Marten



-------- Logged at  Mon Feb 21 09:58:04 MET 1994  ---------