My apologies for the confusion over this when you called in; while we had briefed the support team on RESTful WHOIS, we hadn't covered the updated Bulk Whois interface as it is a bit of a specialized item and coming out on the next release of ARIN Online due to its need for "API key" support. The 26 June release of ARIN Online will allow you to create and manage these keys, which in turn may be used in RESTful calls (and email templates!) for authentication. A brief overview of this feature was provided at the ARIN Toronto meeting and is available here:
https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_XXV/PDF/Tuesday/Newto...
We will rollout the API key functionality and Bulk Whois via the RESTful interface with this next release of ARIN Online on 26 June, and this will allow the Bulk Whois data to be downloaded directly without logging into ARIN Online by using a RESTful HTTP request containing your "API key". As Mark Kosters noted in his message, we did contact current Bulk Whois users ahead of time about these changes, but if you were missed or have any questions about the change, please don't hesitate to contact myself or Mark directly.
john, today, a research batch script running periodic bulk whois work has a line something like ncftpget ftp://user:pass@ftp.arin.net/arin_db.txt.gz well, it can actually be simpler. for the web 9.3 impaired of us, could you describe the simple batch script line under the new improved system? thanks! randy