In such a case, if this network's border router operates with flap damping enabled, route flapping caused by instability up the stream prevents the network from accessing the whole Internet, including all root server networks. Motivation included performance enhancement, new functionality and maintainability. A decision was taken to do a full rewrite after modifying the old code to support the referral mechanism and referential integrity. The Alpha version has been online since 31 Dec 1999. The development is still focused on adding functionality.
Next steps are documentation, testing and porting.
General differences between RPSL and ripe-181 were briefly discussed. Some RPSL modifications will affect all objects, not only routing-related. A request for active beta testing was expressed towards the community. This database can be queried at reimp.ripe.net port 4343. The PGP authentication is not functional as of yet, though.