SWIP and Rwhois in the Real World

Tue Sep 6 21:01:40 UTC 2005

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Crist Clark wrote:

>
> As best I can tell from ARIN documents, ISP still are supposed to SWIP
> or use Rwhois for subassignments of /29 and greater. However, is this
> still widely practiced these days? Especially among smaller ISPs?
>
> I know the privacy pros and cons, so I don't seek to start those threads
> again. I'm interested in what smaller ISPs are actually doing these days.

My experience at a bunch of ISPs of varying sizes I've worked for or 
consulted for, has been that most haven't until they ran out for the first 
time.  Often, at that point, they weren't keeping especially good track of 
of what had been used either.  What followed was generally lots of 
scrambling to put the documentation together in a hurry, to avoid having 
to turn customers away.

Sometimes, they've gone on to repeat the lack of documentation followed by 
a mad scramble a time or two, but the lesson generally gets learned 
eventually.

I've never seen ARIN give more space without documentation of the 
previous allocation that at least looked plausible, and those I've seen 
try to produce plausible looking instead of factual documentation have 
generally found themselves very flustered when ARIN started asking 
questions.

-Steve