Deletion of person objects. Final reminder

Dear all,

(apologies for duplicates)

Today is the 21st of September.

As such, the RIPE NCC will proceed to delete the set of person/role 
objects detailed in my previous announcements from the RIPE Database. 
Please see the URL 
http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/orphaned.html for 
information on the details of the objects to be deleted.

The following is an outline of the process we will be using:

1. Stop updating the database on Friday, 21, at 18:00 CEST.
2. Remove all person objects according to the criteria:
	- maintained _only_ by DE domain resellers and not referenced
         - not maintained and not referenced
    This will take ~15 hours
3. Next day, on Saturday restart the server with the new database.
4. Resume the updates.

As you can see, this process will result in period of a few hours 
during which UPDATE/ADDITION/DELETION messages sent to the RIPE 
Database will not be processed immediately, but rather stored for 
later processing.

Queries will be serviced by our hot spare machine. Users will not 
notice any downtime on that part of the service.

The length of the outage is directly related to the number of objects 
to be deleted (more than 2 million) and the need to use special 
processes to finalise the process in a reasonable time.

Further to this deletion, and in order to avoid replication of the 
current situation after this deletion process, incoming messages 
containing person and role objects originating from domain name 
related activities will NOT be processed.

The RIPE NCC will contact any source of such messages in order to 
clear any possible misunderstandings.

Hoping to have informed you well,

Joao Luis Silva Damas
Chief Technical Officer
RIPE NCC