69/8...this sucks -- Centralizing filtering..

Tue Mar 11 19:49:35 UTC 2003

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Ray Bellis wrote:

> Most people seem to think it would be impractical to put the root name
> servers in 69.0.0.0/8
> 
> Why not persuade ARIN to put whois.arin.net in there instead?  It
> shouldn't take the people with the broken filters *too* long to figure
> out why they can't do IP assignment lookups...

The vast majority of broken networks won't care/notice.  A few will assume
ARIN's whois server is broken.  How often do people on forgotten networks
in China and Albania use ARIN's whois server?

Take away the western Internet (all of gtld-servers.net) and they will 
notice the problem.  

>From a whois, it appears Verisign owns gtld-servers.net.  Do they own just 
the domain or all 13 gtld-servers as well?  Anyone from Verisign reading 
NANOG care to comment on the odds of Verisign cooperating and helping 
with the breaking in of new IP ranges?

Also, on a side rant here....Why do all the RIR's have to give out whois
data in different, incompatible, referal-breaking formats?  The next step
in my work once my ping sweep is complete (looks like that'll be today) is
going to be to take a list of what looks like it'll be ~1000 IPs and
generate a list of the unique networks that are broken.  To do this, it'd
be nice if there were some key I could get from whois, store in a column,
select a unique set from, then reuse to lookup POCs from whois, and send
off the emails.

registro.br and LACNIC entries start with inetnum: using what I'll call
brief CIDR, i.e.
inetnum:  200.198.128/19

APNIC and RIPE entries start with inetnum:, but use range format.  i.e.
inetnum:      203.145.160.0 - 203.145.191.255

ARIN entries include fields like
NetRange:   128.63.0.0 - 128.63.255.255 
CIDR:       128.63.0.0/16 

The APNIC and RIPE NetRange/inetnum fields are easy enough to deal with, 
but send a whois request for 200.198.128/19 to whois.arin.net and you get 
"No match found".  Send it as 200.198.128, and whois.arin.net will refer 
you to whois.lacnic.net.  Send it to whois.lacnic.net as 200.198.128, and 
you get "Invalid IP or CIDR block".

I realize programming around all this is by no means an insurmountable
task, but it is a pain.  It'd be ideal if there were a unique key field,
say Net-ID included in the whois output from all the RIR whois servers
that could be used to identify the network and the appropriate whois
server.  i.e.

NetID: 200.198.128.0 at whois.lacnic.net

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 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
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