Consider this a side note to the preceding discussion.

1. Most of our clients understand that their ''lease'' on network address space is at our whim, by contract for IP connectivity, and is subject to renumbering if WE assign them new space, if WE are assigned new space, or if they move elsewhere.

Therefore they don't ask us to SWIP the nets nor do they care.

So...

2. RWHOIS doesn't run on any production operating system. I know Unix is in vogue, but since we do the 99.96% uptime schtick, we use operating systems that stay up (VMS). This means we can't run RWHOIS (even if we did want to, which if you read #1 above you'll see we don't.)

I don't see any reason you couldn't modify RWHOIS to compile/run on VMS. It's pretty straightforward C code with very few UNIX specific calls in it. Admittedly, we run UNIX (which has been up 99.96%+ at our site). In fact, the last time I worked in a shop with a bunch of VMS users, the VMS system was down alot more often than our UNIX systems. Oh well... Guess it's religion.

3. We currently use almost all of a /18, two thirds of a /19, a few /22s, and some /24s. It would be easy to justify a /17 based on all this, but if someone wanted to be rigid about RWHOIS and SWIP, even a bunch of traceroutes aren't going to convince them.

Back in THE GOOD OLD DAYS (tm), we said "Be flexible with what you accept, be rigid with what you send out." (Others made it sound better and put it in RFCs... D.C. for one.. :)

That applies to network protocols and interactions between machines.

Nowadays I see the motto has become "Be rigid in what you accept, and modify your templates as often as possible." This criticism applies equally to the RA IRR as it does to the InterNIC.

I will support this criticism of the NIC, but the RA has not refused any of my submissions based on templates over a year old.

Gee, and this started out as one sentence that went "We don't run RWHOIS, our clients don't want it, our operating system won't support it, and you better listen when we ask for a /17 ;)"

We don't conform to any standard, we don't care what the rest of the net does, and you better give us what we want when we want it. Cute. I expected better from you of all people, Ehud.

Ehud

Owen