Re: Question on 7.0.0.0/8

[Jeroen Massar <jeroen () unfix org>]

David Conrad wrote:
[..]
> > Why doesn't IANA operate a whois server?
>
> We do.  The proper question to ask is why isn't our whois server
> populated with address information instead of just domain name
> information.  I don't know the reason historically.  However, today,
> when the topic was recently raised, concerns were expressed that IANA
> would be seen in competition with the RIRs and there are those that
> believe IANA (ICANN) should have no "operational" role whatsoever.  With
> that said, IANA continues to look at adding top level (i.e., /8s for
> IPv4) block allocation information to the IANA whois server and this is
> something we're discussing with the RIRs -- I don't think anybody is
> particularly happy with the current state of affairs.

Competition? How can it be competition when you are at the top of the
food chain. Unless I am misunderstanding something completely that is
the place that IANA has.

IANA has all the address space. It loans chunks of this address space to
the RIR's by delegating it to them. Then the RIR's delegate this to
LIR's who delegate it to end-users.

As such, IANA having a whois server which delegates this address space
down to the RIR's would be a great thing to have and also totally
logical and in no way in 'competition' with the RIR's. I am also quite
sure that none of the membership of those RIR's will complain about this.

Do expect people to then, correctly, point their whois client to
whois.iana.org for IP addresses, as then those clients can follow the
refer: headers down to the RIR's where the real data is.

> > Why don't they publish a more detailled explanation field in each IANA
> > allocation record so that they can explain the precise status of each
> > block?
>
> What sort of additional information would be helpful?  As mentioned
> above, we're preparing an XML-based alternative representation of
> various IANA registries which would give us a lot more flexibility than
> the current text based representation.  Feel free to send mail privately
> as this might get a bit down in the weeds for NANOG.

"Database dumps" similar to what the RIR's also are providing.

eg like ftp://ftp.ripe.net/pub/stats

But for IANA that would only be delegation points, thus a list of all
the blocks IANA has delegated to the RIR's.

Same for whois data (aka ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split) so one can
simply fetch all those inet6num's in one go. Of course that doesn't
apply to IANA as the RIR's have that data.


In short: please publish inetnum/inet6num delegations from
whois.iana.org to the RIR's using refer: headers in the data.


On a similar subject, IANA is also a perfect place for an IRR root.
Unfortunately only APNIC, RIPE seem to have a non-beta one. ARIN's
rr.arin.net seems to be a bit underused.

Greets,
 Jeroen

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