Re: Merging RRP and Whois

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:00:29AM +0100, Shane Kerr wrote:
> Plus, there's not any standard for what information should appear in an
> RWhois database.  This means that a client has to be prepared for
> basically ANYTHING.  At least the format of the output is specified.
> Actually, the ability to dynamically query the schema used by a
> particular server is nice, but without a "core" set of guaranteed
> values, it doesn't actually buy you much (ever written a TIFF viewer? -
> same problem).

One of the problems that killed x.500 was its rigid fixed schema. There
are multiple other reasons as well why x.500 died but won't go into it
here. Another issue was the inability of the RIR's to come to some sort of 
agreement on a commmon schema. These two things pushed RWhois to use flexible 
schemas that had to be "discovered".

> Also, the root for the RWhois tree doesn't appear to be well-maintained:
> 
> >From http://www.rwhois.net/rwhois/prwhois.html
> 
>   Query Error
> 
>   A connection could not be made to the RWhois server running at
>   root.rwhois.net:4321

It was was wedged and now is fixed. Thanks for the notice.

> $ traceroute root.rwhois.net
> traceroute to root.rwhois.net (216.168.227.19): 1-30 hops, 38 byte packets
>  1  e10.overtoom.ripe.net (193.0.1.126), 2.13 ms, 2.79 ms, 1.76 ms
>  2  Asd-nr02.NL.kpnqwest.net (134.222.249.81), 8.38 ms, 2.19 ms, 2.88 ms
> <snip/>
> 19  sl-gw2-rly-4-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.14.46), 93.8 ms (ttl=240!), 94.4 ms (ttl=240!), 93.6 ms (ttl=240!)
> 20  sl-netsolut-2-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.184.78), 98.6 ms (ttl=239!), 102 ms (ttl=239!), 96.5 ms (ttl=239!)
> 21  10.192.16.65 (10.192.16.65), 95.4 ms (ttl=238!), 95.9 ms (ttl=238!), 95.5 ms (ttl=238!)
> 22  10.192.16.65 (10.192.16.65), 95.6 ms (ttl=238!) !U *, 96.2 ms (ttl=238!) !U
> 
> Hmm...wasn't there a discussion about exposing private IP addresses on
> NANOG recently?  Anyway, even when the root WAS working, it didn't
> actually refer IP queries to ARIN, which would have been the logical
> thing to do.  At least, for the "referral" in RWhois to mean anything.

Apologies on the net 10 stuff. The routing people have been notified
here to get that fixed. 

Regarding referrals on ip addresses, referrals do go to ARIN (if you want 
to check.

> Admittedly, most of these items have nothing at all to do with the
> RWhois protocol itself.  But with only a single implementation and a
> user base I can count on my toes, it's hard to separate the
> implementation problems from the protocol problems.

This is where I really wanted to go. If one was to make a new protocol,
is there any thing would one want to want to add on to or modify in
creating a new protocol? RWhois was built to solve this distributed "whois"
info lookup problem. Perhaps some of the ideas could be used in a improved 
protocol that could be widely accepted.

Thanks,
Mark 

-- 

Mark Kosters             [email protected]       Verisign Applied Research
PGP Key fingerprint =  1A 2A 92 F8 8E D3 47 F9  15 65 80 87 68 13 F6 48