<html><head></head><body>I'll simply endorse the 'stop judging an IP by it's RIR' approach. As a New Zealander (and APNIC is our RIR), having to convince US institutions that our subnets should not be blocked simply because they're out of the same /8 as those used by other Asian nations with poorer IP address reputations , is a challenge because, well, a nation of 4.5M in the south Pacific is insignificant, right? :S<br><br>Also if the whole /8 doesn't sit within the same organisation or country, how is it smart to use it as any sort of differentiator?<br><br>Have banged my head against this one many times in my career to-date.<br><br>Mark.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 12 December 2018 5:58:18 AM NZDT, Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">Spurling, Shannon <shannon@more.net> wrote:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">When I call a health care organization, or a web hosting provider, the<br>first thing I get is that they think we are trying to pull one over on<br>them and all these ranges must be in Africa or Asia. I show them the<br>ARIN information for the specific /16, and sometimes I can make some<br>headway. Sometimes there's no convincing them. This issue appears to be<br>getting worse over time, so I was wondering if some misguided<br>organization or group is going around pressing for the rules that are<br>triggering these issues?<br></blockquote><br>I'm somewhat inclined to blame poor `whois` implementations for this.<br><br>Apart from `whois` being generally very crappy, there are specific issues<br>on the server side and the client side which mean the human driving whois<br>often needs a good deal of expertise to be able to properly track down the<br>authoritative registration details for a netblock.<br><br>On the server side, APNIC and RIPE do not return proper referrals for ERX<br>netblocks. This is annoying, because they know which of the other RIRs is<br>responsible for the registration - they have to get the reverse DNS<br>information from the other RIR. Examples: 150.108.0.0 (an APNIC /8 but the<br>/16 is allocated to Fordham University and managed through ARIN); and<br>141.111.0.0 (a RIPE /8 but the /16 is allocated to LANL and managed<br>through ARIN).<br><br>AfriNIC's whois server is more helpful: it seems to proxy queries to RIPE<br>and APNIC as appopriate, and returns RDAP referrals for ARIN.<br><br>On the client side, these days it is mostly possible to find the correct<br>whois server to ask by following referrals from IANA. (In the past whois<br>clients had to have a fairly large database of starting points.) A<br>reasonably intelligent referral-oriented whois client can work around<br>missing referrals for early netblock allocations by guessing, which<br>usually means restarting with ARIN. But in practice most whois clients are<br>pretty stupid, and the referral-oriented ones keep breaking when servers<br>change. (e.g. I just found out AfriNIC's behaviour has changed since I<br>last looked...)<br><br>Tony.</pre></blockquote></div><br>-- <br>Sent from a mobile device.</body></html>