And on a related topic (whois.ripe.net almost unreachable, along with the rest of RIPE): rwhois.level3.net:4321 as been MIA or AWOL for about 4 days: Level3 was informed, but seems to have some good reasons of their own not to fix this.... $ telnet rwhois.level3.net 4321 Trying 209.244.1.179... telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused