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

[Owen DeLong]

The RR is a routing registry.
WHOIS is a contact directory.

The two serve very different purposes and are related only in that  
both contain
information about network blocks.  In database parlance, I would say  
that they
are two completely different tables linked by a single common key.

This is an oversimplification of the relationship, of course, because  
the RR
has ancillary contact information associated with maintainer records.

This was actually proposed at the Montreal meeting and met with fairly
strong opposition.  I think it would be detrimental to the purpose of  
the RR
to start populating it automatically.  A network without policy in  
the RR is
contrary to the intended purpose of the RR.  A network with incorrect
policy in the RR would be even worse.

Owen

On Sep 14, 2006, at 3:34 PM, william(at)elan.net wrote:

>
> Asking for CIDR is good - I tried doing it once before even when it  
> was
> "old" ARIN whois server, obviously it has not been implimented...
>
> Regarding copy whois into RR - ARIN will probably not do it since RR
> is running on different type of software (at least from what I know -
> somebody from ARIN can clarify), but possibly they could add an option
> to sub-lookup in RR database together with ARIN's regular whois. My
> understanding however is that in US RRs are not quite as centric to  
> RIR
> as it is with RIPE/APNIC so data can well be in some other RR and ARIN
> does not want to provide such data with regular whois if it can not
> trust it - again somebody from ARIN would have to clarify.
>
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>
>> 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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