High volume WHOIS queries

Tue Mar 1 14:47:23 UTC 2005

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Paul G wrote:

>>> point - they're trying to restrict the practicality of
>>> attempting to harvest
>>> the data and an open to the public whois server with no
>>> access restrictions
>>> would defeat that.
>
>> I don't know that this is the case, I suspect it's
>> resource management. If the database is getting
>> slaughtered by applications on uncontrolled auto pilot,
>> it's unusable for the rest of us.
>
> well, the OP quoted a portion of the aup that requires bulk
> whois data recipients to take measures to prevent harvesting,
> so i presume that arin does care about that and, in fact, that
> consideration is likely the reason they declined to permit the
> OP to run *his own* whoisd off of his *local* copy of the data.

If memory serves, that restriction didn't appear until spam became a 
problem. The verbiage in the AUP is there to give ARIN recourse in the 
event that some spammer, and it has happened, runs a harvest against 
domain names or serialized NIC handles to seed a spam source.

- billn