Re: Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN???s Directory Services)

Also, there are users, who occasionally want to check something and will be
turned away.

On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 8:54 PM Rich Kulawiec via NANOG <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 07:44:31PM -0400, Shane Ronan via NANOG wrote:
> > Your email says "This transition is an important step toward improving
> > alignment with established IETF standards.", aligning a new feature to a
> > standard doesn't mean shutting down a service that is used in so many
> ways,
> > and expecting users to rely on a service that by your own admission isn't
> > the standard in todays OS deployments.
> >
> > Wouldn't it make sense to work with the OS community to rdap clients
> > ubiquitous before pushing a sunset of whois?
>
> I strongly concur with this.  There are no doubt a LOT of people who
> have no idea that any of this happening, but who have built extensive
> tooling on top of whois and will not be happy when it all suddenly breaks
> (with whatever operational consequences that implies).
>
> What needs to happen is: (1) the developers of every significant whois
> client need to be notified (2) they need to be convinced to put a notice
> in the client software (3) they need to push a release (4) the release
> needs to be picked up by every significant OS distribution (5) the
> release needs to be adopted by most of the users those OS distributions.
> And then (6) software with equivalent functionality needs to be developed
> and tested and deployed and picked up and so on.  Maybe that means
> modifying what already exists, maybe it means starting over; but whatever
> it is, it needs to be ubiquitous *well before* anyone can even consider
> discussing turning off whois.
>
> That's going to take a long time -- years.  But it needs to be done
> in order to avoid blindsiding a lot of people who've spent years
> (decades) building and relying on whois.
>
> ---rsk
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