[ppml] whois.arin.net and bulk requests

[william(at)elan.net]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Leo Bicknell wrote:

> In a message written on Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 04:19:04PM -0400, Leslie Nobile wrote:
> > No, there are no provisions to setup mirrors of whois.arin.net.  And yes,
> 
> At the risk of opening a huge can of worms.....
> 
> Perhaps the RIR's could help each other by trading backup hosting
> for whois services.  That is, ARIN would set up a server to mirror
> whois.ripe.net, whois.apnic.net, whois.lacnic.net, etc.  RIPE would
> do the same, and soforth.

While its pretty easy for ARIN to setup servers to mirror APNIC and RIPE, 
the reverse is not so easy because of custom whois database software that 
ARIN is using, that I believe would require entire system supplied and 
maintained by ARIN (although possibly other RIR could volunteeer to supply 
bandwidth and colocation while letting ARIN maintain the system).

Of course, all that would not be a problem if ARIN was actually using same 
whois server software and whois data format as other RIRs and I note that 
ALL other RIRs - that is RIPE, APNIC and LACNIC (and they will soon be 
joined by AFRINIC) are using same whois software (rpsl ripe whois server 
based) and format (some fields are not used or named differently by 
certain RIRs, but in general its all the same) and that software supports 
mirroring and other functions already discussed and requested here. 

I also would note that data components and fields in latest version of 
ripe whois server (that is the one that includes org) are almost same 
as what ARIN uses, although ARIN has more consistancy about parent->child 
relantionship between certain data components, but that can easily be 
enforced at the data entry. 

P.S. What happened to ARIN maintaining off-site backup whois server that 
it mentioned at least once before? Is it used only for "scheduled" outages? 
If so, solution is to setup monitoring system that will check for 
"unscheduled" outages and change routing or dns to backup site
automaticly if they happen.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net