Week 1 Status Report

  > Marten Terpstra <Marten.Terpstra at ripe.net> writes:
  > 
  > ...

  >  *   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.

Progress indeed!

  >  *   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.

Given the transatlantic bottlenecks these days we really should look into
making context diffs, shipping these and patching them in. This has also been
a long standing request from some db shadow sites here. Any showstoppers
there?

  >  * 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.

We need to establish "source:" names and exact descriptions of what they
mean. I suggest something like MERIT-RR for your routing data.

We need to make the tools just a little more configurable in the sense
of how they use different whois servers on "source:"s.

I would like to make a *joint* announcement about this if this is politically
acceptable to you. 

  >  *   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 ;-)

Mainly some suggestions I'd say. How can we make this stuff better?

You can also help us documentation wise. If you have notes about experiences
when installing the stuff we would surely like to include them in some form
in the distribution.

We are also doing a complete re-write of the user documentation of the
database. Your input on that would be highly appreaciated.

Daniel




-------- Logged at  Mon Feb 21 23:46:53 MET 1994  ---------