[ppml] whois.arin.net and bulk requests

[Jon Lewis]

ARIN seems to be having trouble keeping whois.arin.net working.  Anyone
know what's wrong and if there's an ETR this time?

I found the form to request bulk whois data on the ARIN web site.  I'm
curious how free ARIN is with this.  Is the fact that I'd like to be able
to find out who the IPs abusing my netowrk belong to regardless of the
current state of whois.arin.net a good enough reason?  I got paged at 2am
last night to deal with a DoS attack and found I was unable to use
whois.arin.net to find out who the flooding IPs or their AS's belonged to.
I see it's either still or again down now, 12 hours later.

What format is the bulk whois data made available in?  How is it kept in
sync?  Would I have to periodically download the whole thing, or is there
an rsync server?  Does ARIN make the whois daemon they use available (for
use with the bulk data)?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________