nanog mailing list archives

Re: High volume WHOIS queries


From: Bill Nash <billn () billn net>
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 06:47:23 -0800 (PST)


On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Paul G wrote:

point - they're trying to restrict the practicality of
attempting to harvest
the data and an open to the public whois server with no
access restrictions
would defeat that.

I don't know that this is the case, I suspect it's
resource management. If the database is getting
slaughtered by applications on uncontrolled auto pilot,
it's unusable for the rest of us.

well, the OP quoted a portion of the aup that requires bulk
whois data recipients to take measures to prevent harvesting,
so i presume that arin does care about that and, in fact, that
consideration is likely the reason they declined to permit the
OP to run *his own* whoisd off of his *local* copy of the data.

If memory serves, that restriction didn't appear until spam became a problem. The verbiage in the AUP is there to give ARIN recourse in the event that some spammer, and it has happened, runs a harvest against domain names or serialized NIC handles to seed a spam source.

- billn


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