SWIP and Rwhois in the Real World

Tue Sep 6 21:07:51 UTC 2005

> On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Crist Clark wrote:
>
> AFAIK, it is still required, but my own experience has been that some do, 
> some do only in preparation for their next IP space request (i.e. fall behind 
> on swips, then to a big catch-up before approaching ARIN for more space), and 
> some just don't.  I have to wonder how that last group gets more space out of 
> ARIN, since they don't follow the rules.

In my previous life at a mid-sized ISP, we migrated away from doing SWIPs 
to using an in-house rwhois server.  This was done to make keeping the 
records up to date in our environment less expensive (people cycles) and 
easier to automate.

We tied this to our provisioning system, so the rwhois data was within 24 
hours of being up to date.  We never had any problems getting additional 
IP space after pointing ARIN to that server.  I could see in the logs 
that they actually did query it, so there actually was legwork done to 
verify that our requests were valid.

The interface between the provisioning database and the rwhois server was 
a little kludgey, but the rwhois piece just simply works.  I like 'simply' 
and 'works' ;-)

jms