I'm very happy to report that my post here found the necessary clue-holders and resolved both the lame DNS and stale email configuration issue. Also, one important followup wrt the whois for their ASN query:
Finally, as an additional note, the whois delegation for their ASN seems to be broken:
$ whois -h whois.arin.net 17184 [Querying whois.arin.net] [Redirected to rwhois.cbeyond.net:4321] [Querying rwhois.cbeyond.net] [rwhois.cbeyond.net] %rwhois V-1.5:003eff:00 rwhois.cbeyond.net (by Network Solutions, Inc. V-1.5.9.5) %error 230 No Objects Found $
It appears that the breakage is probably in my whois client (though, the exact problem has yet to be diagnosed). The standard whois client for CentOS 5.1 still returns the 230 error: $ whois -h whois.arin.net AS17184 [Querying whois.arin.net] [Redirected to rwhois.cbeyond.net:4321] [Querying rwhois.cbeyond.net] [rwhois.cbeyond.net] %rwhois V-1.5:003eff:00 rwhois.cbeyond.net (by Network Solutions, Inc. V-1.5.9.5) %error 230 No Objects Found I had one private reply pointing out that my original syntax was wrong in omitting the "AS" string, though I'd tried it every way I could imagine, and verified that the syntax worked for other ASNs. The whois client on my OS X 10.4 returns the desired results: $ whois -h whois.arin.net AS17184 OrgName: CBEYOND COMMUNICATIONS, LLC OrgID: CBEY Address: 320 Interstate North Parkway Address: Suite 300 City: Atlanta StateProv: GA PostalCode: 30339 Country: US <snip> On my ToDo is to dig deeper into the problem and figure out who needs a bug report to fix this. I'm guessing it lies with CentOS/RHEL, and has to do with a failure to use the custom whois port assignment @ Cbeyond. Thanks for all the private replies, especially the one that lead to this resolution! Mike