Disappointing ARIN - A great advertisement for the USA ?

Mon Sep 12 16:46:05 UTC 2011

That was on June 25th according to Mark Kosters.  They started to answer
with both the parent and delegated objects.  That hosed the way RWHOIS data
was being reported to most things as the client won't know which to send
through to the rwhois servers.  Still works from an old SCO box but not from
anything current.

A "+" flag on the query from some clients will get it to recurse, but for my
tests kicked back "%error 350 Invalid Query Syntax". 

My issue with that response is that the general whois query shouldn't have
to have an extra flag passed to get the data you asked for in the first
place.   This traps out most of the standard users from ever getting the
correct data.  It also makes the rwhois data almost impossible for the
general public to get.

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Lewis [mailto:jlewis at lewis.org] 
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 11:32 AM
To: Jeroen Massar
Cc: ppml at arin.net; NANOG
Subject: Re: Disappointing ARIN - A great advertisement for the USA ?

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> On 2011-09-12 17:40 , Always Learning wrote:
>
> Dear person who is to scared to setup a regular email account in his 
> own full name.
>
> [..]
>> The Internet was created in North America. Many people around the 
>> world would appreciate your help in getting ARIN to revert to normal 
>> WHOIS displays. ARIN wants enquirers to click on web page after web 
>> page to try and find the information previously displayed in a single
response.
>> Frankly that weird attitude is stark raving bonkers!
>
> You are confusing RPSL (RFC2650) with WHOIS (RFC812,RFC954,RFC3912).

No he's not.  He's complaining that sometime in the past few weeks (or is it
months now?) ARIN changed the behavior of their whois server.  New output
for the query 209.208.0.1 is (omitting comments):

Internet Connect Company, Inc. ICC-1 (NET-209-208-0-0-1) 209.208.0.0 -
209.208.127.255 American Registry for Internet Numbers NET209
(NET-209-0-0-0-0) 209.0.0.0 - 209.255.255.255

The old behavior was that ARIN's whois server would respond with the data
from NET-209-208-0-0-1.  i.e.

NetRange:       209.208.0.0 - 209.208.127.255
CIDR:           209.208.0.0/17
OriginAS:
NetName:        ICC-1
NetHandle:      NET-209-208-0-0-1
Parent:         NET-209-0-0-0-0
NetType:        Direct Allocation
...

This is rather an annoying change for anyone who uses whois much as it means
every ARIN query is now at least two queries and there are doubtless scripts
in use to grab information from whois that broke as a result of this change.
NANOG isn't the place to complain about this though. 
Perhaps PPML is closer to the right place.

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  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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