RWHOIS

[Mark Kosters]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 04:55:45PM +0200, Shane Kerr wrote:
> The new RIPE Whois server, in production since April 23, is Much
> Improved(tm).  Currently it only supports referrals for several types of
> records - network allocations (inetnum) are not among them.  It would
> probably be a lot less work to add this capability than to maintain two
> seperate database interfaces.  Perhaps ARIN should pursue this as a goal
> instead of taking on maintaining RWhois?  After all, the RIPE Whois
> server is very actively maintained.  ;)

I'm glad to hear that RIPE has improved their database.

Personally, I'd like to see the data distributed and not reliant on
a box (or boxes) that have to chase referrals for the distributed info to
send back to the client.  We do this at the Verisign registrar for the 
gtld whois stuff and it is non-trivial.  Resources to do this at fairly high 
volume rates is pretty expensive. 

Work is on-going to replace this creaky system. I hate to see ARIN follow
this model and caught a couple of years from now with volumes that they
may not want to be able to sustain*.

Regards,
Mark

*there have been proposals from various types of vendors to use the whois 
data from ARIN et al to improve their services (legit ones - not spammers). 
Someday they may do so. I hope that we can create the right sort of 
infrastucture to make it happen without a lot of pain.

-- 

Mark Kosters             markk at netsol.com       Verisign Applied Research
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