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
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 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
SWIP was greatly rewarded.
³Dead² is probably not the right word. Perhaps ³obsolete² is better. Do people still use it? Yes. I installed and ran it in the early aughts when that was ARIN¹s 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.