[ppml] CIDR support for whois.arin.net / merging whois with rr data?

[Jeroen Massar]

Hi,

I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask this question, but it 
seems to be the most appropriate place to ask this. I could not find a 
policy or any guidelines for this kind of request, if there is any 
please point me to it and otherwise it might be good to document it 
somewhere.

Currently when one queries whois.arin.net for an address with a 
prefixlength it will return that it doesn't support CIDR:

8<----------------------------------------
$ whois -h whois.arin.net 2620::/48

CIDR queries are not accepted

No match found for 2620::/48.
---------------------------------------->8
It clearly detects I am asking for a CIDR block.

Simply stripping the /48 helps in this case:
8<----------------------------------------
$ whois -h whois.arin.net 2620::

OrgName:    U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission
OrgID:      USEC
...
---------------------------------------->8

The client can of course do this automatically for you, but that is not 
very useful, especially with IPv4 in mind where one can ask for 
192.0.2.0/26 while the that is actually inside a /25, you will get back 
that there are 2 possibilities. For tool writers this is not an optimal 
solution either, also one will have to do a second query, copying in the 
name of the network as a query. With IPv6 it will be even more fun, /32 
is doable, /48 is also doable, but can you strip it to a /33, /42 etc?
Next to that CIDR was introduced in 1993 (before I even had internet at 
home ;) which is already 13 years ago, thus it is definitely way over 
time that the ARIN whois starts supporting this.


Therefor, I would like to request if the whois query match can be made 
on the prefix including CIDR as that saves a lot of head troubles and is 
generally more convenient.


On a similar subject, there is a rr.arin.net which provides routing 
information. In RIPE/APNIC/AFRINIC/LACNIC land we are very used to 
simply querying whois.<registry> and getting back the information that 
is stored in rr.arin.net. The problem with rr.arin.net is though that it 
seems that not too many organisations are using it. Next to that, if one 
queries the RR for a block for which the inetnum/inet6num is known, but 
the route object isn't one gets back a 0::/0 answer, while it could 
easily return the information in whois.arin.net.

Thus, to possibly solve both problems in one go, could the ARIN staff 
populate rr.arin.net with the information that is currently contained in
whois.arin.net as a first step, and as a second step move whois.arin.net 
to whois-old.arin.net and propagate rr.arin.net as whois.arin.net ?


This will have one drawback, but from certain perspectives not a big 
one: the format of RPSL is quite different from the current format of 
the whois.arin.net output. Then again, the other RIR's are using RPSL 
format already and thus tools are already built to support both formats 
and should not have a problem with RPSL when that would appear as a 
response from their queries.

Greets,
  Jeroen

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