[arin-announce] Change to Whois Query Behavior

[ARIN]

ARIN announces a pending change to Whois query behavior on port 43.

Prior to 25 June 2011, a query for an IP address in the ARIN region
would return with that assignment/allocation within the ARIN region, and
a query in the ARIN region for an IP address with no
assignment/allocation would result in a “no match” response. On 25 June,
a change was misapplied. The intent of this change was to return ARIN’s
/8 for IP queries within ARIN’s region for which there is no
assignment/allocation, a behavior meant to align ARIN’s Whois output
with that of the other RIRs. However, this change introduced an
unintended behavior of returning ARIN’s /8, in addition to the desired
results, in responses where IP addresses had been assigned or allocated.
This change in behavior has created some confusion. On 2 October, ARIN
will reinstate the previous behavior for Whois IP queries so that
results are returned the way they were before 25 June.

ARIN has provided two examples of a Whois query for reference:

* Query with ARIN's /8 returned in the result set hierarchy:
https://www.arin.net/announcements/2011/20110919.html#example1

* Query without ARIN's /8 returned in the result set:
https://www.arin.net/announcements/2011/20110919.html#example2

Whois-RWS behavior will not change as it was not affected by the
configuration change made on 25 June.

We apologize for any confusion this has caused.



Regards,
Mark Kosters
Chief Technical Officer
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)