altho arguably its not up to arin to provide processing power for all these deployments. if you can get a local copy why not have your clients resolve back to that? Steve On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, joe mcguckin wrote:
How about caching the data from previous ARIN whois lookups?
I do agree that the bulk data and high volume limitations on whois servers are silly...
-joe
On 2/28/05 1:30 PM, "Dan Lockwood" <dlockwood@shastacoe.org> wrote:
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