Mailing List Archive: NANOG: users

Whois and the DoD

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hank at efes

Jun 5, 2007, 9:56 AM

Post #1 of 3 (505 views)
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Whois and the DoD

We are all familiar with whois.ripe.net and whois.arin.net and the other
whois services of the other RIRs. It allows us to know who has been
assigned the IP address in question and if needed, it gives us an initial
pointer in how to contact the "IP leaser" in case some network problem has
arisen that would involve them.

Unfortunately, the whois server for the DoD - whois.nic.mil no longer
exists and therefore large chunks of active IP address space are
unknown. For example:
138.138.0.0/16
158.0.0.0/13
[I am sure others can make an exhaustive list]. http://www.nic.mil/ used
to have an online whois service which is also no longer accessible.

I have contacted the RIRs and they admit there is a problem here that they
can't solve.

Based on http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space I would assume
IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization having IP space
from them must operate an accessible whois server.

So is there anyone out in NANOG-land that has a solution?

Thanks,
Hank

drc at virtualized

Jun 5, 2007, 10:57 AM

Post #2 of 3 (468 views)
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Re: Whois and the DoD [In reply to]

Hank,

On Jun 5, 2007, at 9:56 AM, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> I have contacted the RIRs and they admit there is a problem here
> that they can't solve.

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Given the US military is in
the ARIN region, why wouldn't the right answer here be "look it up in
ARIN's database and send mail to the listed contact"?

> Based on http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space I would
> assume IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization
> having IP space from them must operate an accessible whois server.

This hasn't been a requirement in the past. In the future, it is
highly likely the IANA registry will be pointing to the RIRs
responsible for the region in which the address space has be assigned.

Rgds,
-drc

fw at deneb

Jun 5, 2007, 1:26 PM

Post #3 of 3 (465 views)
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Re: Whois and the DoD [In reply to]

* Hank Nussbacher:

> Based on http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space I would
> assume IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization
> having IP space from them must operate an accessible whois server.

For new address space, I agree. I'm not sure if it's worth the
trouble to create a policy for this. Presumably, this is all about
legacy allocations which hardly change, so anyone could compile a
machine-readable list and have them put into the popular clients.

(I assume you mean information such as "this netblock has been given
to that organization", not meaningful WHOIS for sub-allocations.)

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