On Fri, 28 Aug 2026, David Conrad wrote:
John R. Levine via NANOG wrote on 23/08/2026 23:22:
It occurs to me that if people REALLY REALLY want WHOIS, it would not be terribly hard to write a proxy that puts a WHOIS front end on RDAP servers.
While I definitely agree that RDAP is vastly preferable to Whois, care may be warranted here. Aliasing whois to rdap will (may?) work for address lookups, a large number of ccTLDs do not support RDAP (of course, some don’t even support Whois either) and some TLDs (both cc and g) block IPs, e.g., from cloud providers or, oddly, residential ISP blocks.
Remember that this argument was about WHOIS and RDAP at the RIRs. They all do RDAP, and as I'm sure you know, adjusting your code to use it is not hard. I agree it's harder for domains due to the tail of ccTLDs that don't do RDAP, but few of those have WHOIS that returns anything useful. I have been fighting domain RDAP/WHOIS rate limits and I've found that they're the same either way for registries that do both. R's, John