[78300] in North American Network Operators' Group
High volume WHOIS queries
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Lockwood)
Mon Feb 28 16:33:57 2005
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:30:56 -0800
From: "Dan Lockwood" <dlockwood@shastacoe.org>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
I'm in a disagreement with ARIN about my application for bulk whois
data. I've got a software program that needs resolve AS numbers to the
Company Name of the owner. The software app has need to do this on a
very high volume. E.g. I run a report that returns the top 100 AS
destinations for my network and I want to resolve the numbers to the
names as part of the report generation. Since ARIN throttles the number
of queries that you can execute against their servers I seems to "just
make sense" that you would do the processing using local data.
That is all fine and good, but the problem comes when I distribute the
software to users. ARIN's AUP for bulk whois states:
"Redistributing bulk ARIN WHOIS data is explicitly forbidden. It is
permissible to publish the data on an individual query or
small number of queries at a time basis, as long as reasonable
precautions are taken to prevent automated querying by
database harvesters."
My original AUP application stated that I would transfer the data to the
users using an XML file on a regular basis. Clearly in violation of the
first point. Fine. But now after a phone conversation they are telling
me that I can not operate a server to distribute the data on a "per
query" basis too. Providing a server that answers whois queries just
like ARIN seems to be clearly permissible based on the remaining AUP
verbage. At this point the only thing I can get out of the guy/gal on
the phone is "NO!".
Does anyone have any experience doing something like this? How about a
sanity check? Am I completely wrong in how I'm interpreting the AUP?
Thanks,
Dan
