Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@tristatelogic.com> wrote:
You are correct. In this case, it would have been helpful if APNIC's WHOIS server returned something, when queried about 103.11.67.105, that would include an explicit referral to the ARIN WHOIS server. I mean they obviously know all the transfers they've made.
Yes, the state of whois referrals from RIRs is a bit of a mess. I have changed FreeBSD whois to rely more on referrals than built-in knowledge, and this mostly works. There are a couple of hacks to cope with awkward RIRs: AfriNIC's referrals are human-readable though they can be parsed if you assume the rubric is fixed; for RIPE, if the netname is NON-RIPE-NCC-MANAGED-ADDRESS-BLOCK it is treated as a referral to ARIN; there's a similar hack for APNIC's ERX-NETBLOCKs - but evidently this doesn't apply to more recently transferred net blocks :-( It's probably time to make whois use RDAP under the covers for address lookups. Bah. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Southeast Iceland: Westerly veering northwesterly 6 to gale 8, decreasing 4 or 5 for a time. Rough or very rough, occasionally high at first, then becoming moderate in west. Showers. Good, occasionally poor.