Disappointing ARIN - A great advertisement for the USA ?

Mon Sep 12 16:32:20 UTC 2011

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> On 2011-09-12 17:40 , Always Learning wrote:
>
> Dear person who is to scared to setup a regular email account in his own
> full name.
>
> [..]
>> The Internet was created in North America. Many people around the world
>> would appreciate your help in getting ARIN to revert to normal WHOIS
>> displays. ARIN wants enquirers to click on web page after web page to
>> try and find the information previously displayed in a single response.
>> Frankly that weird attitude is stark raving bonkers!
>
> You are confusing RPSL (RFC2650) with WHOIS (RFC812,RFC954,RFC3912).

No he's not.  He's complaining that sometime in the past few weeks (or is 
it months now?) ARIN changed the behavior of their whois server.  New 
output for the query 209.208.0.1 is (omitting comments):

Internet Connect Company, Inc. ICC-1 (NET-209-208-0-0-1) 209.208.0.0 - 209.208.127.255
American Registry for Internet Numbers NET209 (NET-209-0-0-0-0) 209.0.0.0 - 209.255.255.255

The old behavior was that ARIN's whois server would respond with the data 
from NET-209-208-0-0-1.  i.e.

NetRange:       209.208.0.0 - 209.208.127.255
CIDR:           209.208.0.0/17
OriginAS:
NetName:        ICC-1
NetHandle:      NET-209-208-0-0-1
Parent:         NET-209-0-0-0-0
NetType:        Direct Allocation
...

This is rather an annoying change for anyone who uses whois much as it 
means every ARIN query is now at least two queries and there are doubtless 
scripts in use to grab information from whois that broke as a result of 
this change.  NANOG isn't the place to complain about this though. 
Perhaps PPML is closer to the right place.

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