[ARIN-consult] Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services

[William Herrin]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2026 at 8:16 AM ARIN <info at arin.net> wrote:
> We also expect RDAP clients to become increasingly common in OS distributions in the coming years.

Howdy,

Speaking for myself:

When you retire WHOIS, I don't want RDAP clients to be "increasinging
common" in OS distributions or available as something I can compile
for installation in /usr/local/bin. I want it to already be present as
a standard software package on my 3-year-old Linux server. And I want
it to work about as well as "whois 1.2.3.4" does now.

Debian Linux added the rdap package in release 13 on 8/9/2025. If
Debian Linux were your benchmark, that means you could reasonably
retire the whois service on or after August 9 2028. Not before.

>From what I can gather, an RDAP client is not directly available in
Red Hat RHEL 10, although if you trust and can use the SNAP ecosystem
it's available as a SNAP package. I would not consider a SNAP package
to be generally available -- I'd want to see a native RPM. My three
year clock would not start until that happens. I would probably
consider adding an official ARIN RPM repo to be reasonable -- adding
repos is a low lift and ARIN is trustworthy enough that it won't raise
a flag during my customers' security audits.

I did not find anything described as an RDAP tool in the Microsoft
Windows Store. There are multiple whois tools though I've no idea
about their efficacy.


It would not greatly offend me if at some point ARIN's whois port
started returning RDAP results in a format comparable to the RDAP
client. Asking me to move my _automation_ off of whois sooner than the
service's final retirement seems reasonable.


> ARIN understands that Whois (Port 43) carries a high volume of
> queries and will require the longest timeline to retire. We propose
> a two-year sunsetting window, during which ARIN will engage in
> active outreach to users.

For the reasons stated above, hard no on a two year retirement
timeline. Though again, it would not offend me if there was a 2-year
deprecation notice that on or about 1/1/29 the results from port 43
will continue to be provided and human readable but their format will
change without notice with no further attempt to support automation.

Except insofar as it has been integrated into the port 43 results, I
never really used rwhois or rwhois-rws. Their retirement timelines are
less concerning to me.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/