SWIP and Rwhois in the Real World

Tue Sep 6 22:21:56 UTC 2005

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Will Yardley wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 01:37:53PM -0700, 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?
>
> My understanding of the ARIN policy is that the reassignment information
> must be made available in those cases, but that the reassignment data
> doesn't have to be made public - i.e., providing an rwhois server only
> accessible to ARIN is acceptable.

That is a loophole really in how the policy was written before (invented
by those who do not want to provide public data in the first place; and
someone reading for first time, would have hard time coming such a
conclusion). About year ago this loophole was fixed with additional 
policy on rwhois - http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2003_5.html
which says:

"The distributed information service must be operational 24 hours a day,
7 days a week to both the general public and ARIN staff. The service is 
allowed reasonable downtime for server maintenance according to generally 
accepted community standards.

The distributed information service must allow public access to 
reassignment information."

The above line is as clear as it gets (if the other two mentions that
data is to be made available to public is not enough), so there this
argument that rwhois should be made available only to ARIN is now
against ARIN's policies and whoever you know who is still making it
should be pointed to URL I listed.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net