Re: Debian RWHOIS

[Bryan Holloway <bholloway () pavlovmedia com>]

On 7/8/15, 7:05 PM, "NANOG on behalf of Ricky Beam"
<nanog-bounces () nanog org on behalf of jfbeam () gmail com> wrote:

> On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 18:12:47 -0400, Jeff Walter <jwalter () weebly com>
> wrote:
> > he basically told me RWHOIS was dead
>
> It is most certainly NOT dead. It is, and always has been, a very small
> userbase. SWIP has always been a pain in the ass. Modern web-ized methods
>
> are more acceptable, but still an ugly mess. But, that said, so are all
> the (r)whois implementations.
>
> In eons long past, I ran an rwhois server. It was almost infinitely
> easier  
> to convert our address management database (text file) into rwhois zone
> data. And since the only reason to do any of this crap was for address
> requests -- once or twice a year, the reduction in man hours dealing with
>
> SWIP was greatly rewarded.


³Dead² is probably not the right word. Perhaps ³obsolete² is better.

Do people still use it? Yes.

I installed and ran it in the early aughts when that was ARIN¹s
requirement for requesting IP blocks when we outgrew those given to us by
UUnet.

It was a giant pain in the butt importing all of our data into it, but we
did, down to the customer /29s, and I patiently waited for ARIN to query
it to meet our obligations.

Finally, one day, I saw a query. One query. (One ping only.) And it
worked, and we got our /19.

So is rwhois dead? Perhaps not. Is it something I would invest any time or
effort into? No.