Re: Disappointing ARIN - A great advertisement for the USA ?

[Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org>]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, Christopher Morrow wrote:

> my guess is that ARIN is hoping folks turn to the actual RESTful
> interface for many scripted purposes...I keep expecting to see some
> example python/perl/etc off:
>
> <https://www.arin.net/resources/whoisrws/index.html>

 Should I change my code to parse the RESTful Interface instead of the
 NICNAME/WHOIS TCP port 43 service?

 Absolutely. We encourage use of the new RESTful service for the purposes
 of programmatic consumption. ARIN plans to make more features available
 on the RESTful interface. The NICNAME/WHOIS service will remain accessible,
 but it may not support the enhanced features we intend to incorporate
 within Whois-RWS.

It'd be nice if the NICNAME/WHOIS was left alone as far as default 
behavior is concerned.

So, our tools that use the NICNAME/WHOIS service for lookups at all the 
other RIRs, now need to be updated to support ARIN's overcomplicated 
web/XML, which nobody else uses?...and it seems even with RWS you still 
need to do multiple queries to go from having an IP to having the full 
whois record.

How does the community (other than some programmers) benefit from this?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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