RELEASE NOTES for RIPE Database 2.2.1 This is a bugfix release with a very little new functionality added. There are some operational changes which should be transparent to the end user but ease the database maintenance. SUPPORTED SYSTEMS This release has been tested with perl 5.004_04 on bsdi3.1 and Solaris 2.6 systems. Please let us know if you have problems running it on other systems. NEW FEATURES Domain name queries ------------------- The behaviour of domain name queries has been changed. When a domain object cannot be found in the database, the search string is stripped towards higher level domains (xxx.yyy.zzz -> yyy.zzz) and the lookup is repeated until a domain object is found or the search string becomes empty. If a domain object with stripped domain name exists in the database and it does not contain a referral attribute the server response is "No entries found ..." and reflects the fact that the domain name originally queried doesn't exist. This is opposite to the behaviour of the previous software version which in this situation returned the higher level domain object if there was one. Referral mechanism ------------------ When referral is made the originally queried domain name is passed to the authoritative server instead of the domain name of the object containing the actual referral. If while doing an inverse query the referral mechanism is activated and the referred server is of type RIPE, the -r flag is passed to it and the -i flag is not passed. This means that the authoritative server's domain object is displayed instead of the local copy in an inverse query response when applicable. The new configuration variable REFERRALENDTXT contains text to be displayed as an end of referred query reponse marker. It is useful for inverse queries when the referred query response can be intermixed with local server responses. A limit for length of referred query response has been implemented, configurable via REFERRALMAXLINES variable. The goal was to prevent badly behaved remote servers from flooding the local server with a huge amount of data. When a referred query response gets truncated a warning message is displayed. Message text is the value of the REFERRALTRUNCTXT configuration variable. MAINTENANCE RELATED CHANGES Timeout for reading from remote server for referred queries implemented. Timing added to processing of overflow index files. If processing of overflow file takes more than 5 second, its time is logged to audit log. Timing of queries implemented. Time info written to query log. Messages about lock contention and time spent waiting for a lock added to audit log. Mechanism for disabling integrity checks implemented. It is needed in some pathological cases involving legacy data. Warnings are still generated though. Debugging printout facility added. It is activated with -b flag and is now separate from verbose output (-V). BUG FIXES PGP error "This signature applies to another message" is now catched properly. There were performance problems related to file locking and opening of multiple databases at the same time. These have been fixed. Syntax checks' error messages clarified for admin-c, tech-c, zone-c and author attributes. It was possible to create top level domain automatically (hierarchical authorisation did't work in this case). It is not possible any more - requests for top level domain creation are refused now. Domain creation was refused due to hierarchical authorisation procedure when there was no higher level domain object found. It is fixed now. AUTO1 (actually AUTO\d*) is not treated as a valid nic handle any more. It is a reserved word. When a delete request was sent with a missing source attribute it caused dbupdate process to return with an error code and a bounce sent to update originator. It is corrected now. It was not possible to add a nic handle attribute to an existing person object without a nic handle. Such an update was interpreted as the creation of a new person object which led to a situation when two essentially identical person objects exist in the database. This behaviour has been fixed. Now, it is possible to add a nic-handle attribute to an existing person object. It was not possible to update the values of changed attribute only. An attempt to do so resulted in NOOP error. This is corrected now and changed attribute values are now taken into account when comparing objects.