[consult] Call for Consultation: ARIN WHOIS Directory Services

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> > It strikes me that people are forgetting that we are 
> dealing with IP 
> > address ranges, not CIDR blocks. ARIN does not allocate 
> CIDR blocks, 
> > they allocate IP address ranges, especially to larger ISPs.
> 
>       Are you kidding me?    ARIN allocates Internet Resources, which
> we collectively refer to in CIDR notation, since the classful 
> schemes were left back in BGP v3.

Referring to addresses in CIDR notation is not what I am talking about.
Nor am I talking about VLSM in operations.

Let's say that I can justify 45,000 addresses for my next ISP
allocation. What will ARIN allocate me?
If you said a /16, you would be wrong. In fact ARIN will allocate me a
range of addresses such as 99.0.0.0-191.255.255. Of course, you can
express this single allocated range as two CIDR blocks, 99.0.0.0/17 and
99.128.0.0/18 but the whois data will still show this as a single
netrange. There is a difference between a range of IP addresses and a
CIDR block.

>      Don't you mean  ..    12.0.0.0-12.127.255.255 ?    Another reason
> some folks need it made easier to do the query than figure 
> out the ranges involved.

Exactly. OVERLAP seems to be more useful than exact matching.

> > Allow a LIMIT clause that limits the number of entries 
> returned, i.e 
> > LIMIT 10 would only return the 10 largest ranges.
> >
> > Allow a MINIMUM clause that also limits entries returned, 
> i.e. MINIMUM
> > /19 would only return ranges equal to or larger than /19
> 
>      Umm, wow is this overkill.   As we have already discussed, the
> 256 limit should be applied and adhered to. 

And what if I don't WANT 256 entries. What if I want to look for ranges
only of a certain size? Or maybe I just want a screenful of the biggest
ranges that overlap a search range.

> Oh man.   Web based portals make a much better look/feel/functionality
> than a unix shell,

And what about security? The issue is security of the communication
channel between ARIN and the PA holders.

--Michael Dillon