Hi Chris, Thanks for the explanation. And thanks to the others who have replied to my original post. 73, John _______________________________________________ Just to put the record straight regarding when/how often the portal data is updated: If you download the encap.txt file from the web portal, it re-creates it for you in realtime from the database, any gateways that have the "hostname" field populated will cause the gateways IP address to be resolved at the time you download it. So this is the "freshest" version you can get. For the FTP site, a cronjob runs once every 5 minutes and checks the current version of the encap.txt file against what the script saw the last time it ran. If it is the same it exits without doing anything. If the versions differ, the script re-creates the encap.txt file, it also resolves any gateways that have the "hostname" field populated. So worst case, the FTP site is 5 minutes behind the database. The RIP44d updates are taken from the FTP site once an hour. Regards, Chris