[181962] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Debian RWHOIS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bryan Holloway)
Thu Jul 9 04:04:00 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Bryan Holloway <bholloway@pavlovmedia.com>
To: Ricky Beam <jfbeam@gmail.com>, Jeff Walter <jwalter@weebly.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2015 00:18:31 +0000
In-Reply-To: <op.x1hbvmlitfhldh@rbeam.xactional.com>
Cc: nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On 7/8/15, 7:05 PM, "NANOG on behalf of Ricky Beam"
<nanog-bounces@nanog.org on behalf of jfbeam@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 18:12:47 -0400, Jeff Walter <jwalter@weebly.com>
>wrote:
>> he basically told me RWHOIS was dead
>
>It is most certainly NOT dead. It is, and always has been, a very small
>userbase. SWIP has always been a pain in the ass. Modern web-ized methods
>=20
>are more acceptable, but still an ugly mess. But, that said, so are all
>the (r)whois implementations.
>
>In eons long past, I ran an rwhois server. It was almost infinitely
>easier =20
>to convert our address management database (text file) into rwhois zone
>data. And since the only reason to do any of this crap was for address
>requests -- once or twice a year, the reduction in man hours dealing with
>=20
>SWIP was greatly rewarded.
=B3Dead=B2 is probably not the right word. Perhaps =B3obsolete=B2 is better=
.
Do people still use it? Yes.
I installed and ran it in the early aughts when that was ARIN=B9s
requirement for requesting IP blocks when we outgrew those given to us by
UUnet.
It was a giant pain in the butt importing all of our data into it, but we
did, down to the customer /29s, and I patiently waited for ARIN to query
it to meet our obligations.
Finally, one day, I saw a query. One query. (One ping only.) And it
worked, and we got our /19.
So is rwhois dead? Perhaps not. Is it something I would invest any time or
effort into? No.
