I realise that some of the people on this list is at the NANOG-13 and that might be why I never got a response on my inquiery about scripts finding contacts for a certain IP. I spent a few hours during the afternoon at putting something together. It's very ugly but it seems to work somewhat... I put it at ftp://swm.pp.se/pub/misc/checkcontact-0.1.tgz, it's about 2k in size and is totally shellscripts. It does the following: first checks if you're trying to find out about a 12/8 or 24/8 and then says that it is not implemented. Arins database seems dysfunctional on these nets it has to be hacked around (sometime). It then whois:es the IP at Arin, and goes to RIPE or APNIC if suitable (looks for certain responses). If it finds no match it truncates (that's what I call it) the IP to a network number according to the old class A, B or C-net scheme. Most of the whois databases seems to be built around this. It then tries again. If it during the process finds several NETBLKs it tries to whois them separately and bring out all those contact adresses. Finally it prints out the adresses it found in the whois database. It works on a lot of nets I tested it with (from the SAR database at http://www.powertech.no/smurf) and I mainly made this because I wanted the SAR to be able to automatically contact admins for the smurf relay:able nets found there. (I personally enter all the nets I get smurfed with there). Ok folks, I know it is ugly and I probably shouldnt release it, but it's on a AS-IS basis and I would like suggestions on how to improve on its functionality. PS. It uses fwhois which is a whois client that is using the format whois nick@whoishost. I realise that a lot of you people out there have whois clients that use whois -h host nick. I guess you have to modify the scripts to work with that. I tried to make it slightly modular to allow these changes to be done on as few places as .. err... reasonably possible or something :) ----- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se