[arin-ppml] [Ext] [FEEDBACK] Anyone else notice that the base whois are not getting maintained well lately?

[Owen DeLong]

Michael,

While whois is (for better or worse) still in wide use today, the reality is that it does not make sense to put further development effort into it.

In reality, the widespread use of the whois protocol is not what needs to be accommodated here, but rather the hobbit people have of using whois as a command.

There’s no way to achieve what you’re asking for without updating all the whois clients to match to it. Rather than do that, I think the more logical approach would be for
whois client developers to recognize that RDAP is the protocol way forward and reimplement whois clients to make use of the RDAP database(s) to achieve the previous
and other desired whois client behaviors.

Owen


> On Oct 22, 2019, at 17:49 , Michael Peddemors <michael at linuxmagic.com> wrote:
> 
> Okay, another case of me rushing emails, and not being clear enough.
> 
> First of all, the 'whois' protocol, in spite of all the talk of RDAP, is still a highly used protocol worldwide.  But for the most part, this was designed before IP run out and the creation of so many cases of inter-RIR transfers.
> 
> Traditionally, whois clients used static lists of 'guesses' for which ranges should be looked up via which RIR, so people didn't have to try all of them via the -h option.
> 
> Eg... https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/blob/next/ip_del_list
> 
> There should be some common and easy way that 'whois' clients can access an up to date listing of what ranges are controlled by which RIR's.
> 
> Eg the previously mentioned 'whois 103.60.14.185' defaults to assuming it is still controlled by APNIC, when in reality this was transferred to ARIN.  Or some of the /16's that haved been moved inter RIR.
> 
> Just a suggestion, a central place where RIR's can register inter RIR transfers, so that 'whois' clients 'hints' files can easily be updated.
> 
> 	-- Michael --
> 
> 
> On 2019-10-22 7:08 a.m., Leo Vegoda wrote:
>> On 10/21/19, 4:35 PM, "ARIN-PPML on behalf of Michael Peddemors" wrote:
>> [...]
>>> You would think that if this has been transferred to ARIN back in 2017,
>>> that the standard 'whois' commands would by now return more recent
>>> information.
>> I suggest using RDAP as the least hassle way of having a client follow a chain and get you the result you want.
>> Kind regards,
>> Leo Vegoda
> 
> 
> 
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