North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Network Solutions, HOSTS

  • From: Rodney Joffe
  • Date: Mon Apr 10 22:45:39 2000


[email protected] wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 18:37:50 EDT, Tom Spindler <[email protected]>  said:
> > Also, whois.geektools.com has been banned by NSI from making queries.
> 
> Well.. is the geektools stuff open source?
> 
> Would NSI rather get the queries from ONE place, or from EVERYWHERE?

I have to assume that someone at NSI has a bug up his or her ****.

I am *very* careful about infringing on copyrights. I made sure over a
year ago to get permission from NSI, specifically David Holtzman, to
operate GeekTools with their data. GeekTools WHOIS is absolutely open
source. The source is downloadable at www.geektools.com/software.html.
It has been since day 1.

GeekTools has a careful rate limiting mechanism. Each source ip
requesting queries is limited to 50 queries a day *total*. This includes
all registries, the RADB, ARIN, etc. If a user wants more, he/she has to
provide physical contact data that we actually verify, an emailed
promise to do "the right thing", and overwhelming reason to justify
greater than 50 queries a day (for example, once a week a sales droid
from an ISP asks for access because he wants to make sales contacts - we
forward his request to his company's abuse desk and NOC :-)). So far, we
have opened the proxy to about 120 users (mostly an upgrade to 500 a day
limits) who are almost exclusively registrars, ISP NOCs, or abuse
departments.

The proxy averages in excess of 120,000 queries a day now. A measurable
portion of them come from NSI address space, as well as ARIN, and RIPE!

The largest users are 3 of the largest registrars on the net.

Our contact info is readily available. And had it not have been for the
fact that NSI *specifically* granted us permission to provide the
service, I might have expected this. Anyhow... we've created a
work-around while we try and reach someone at NSI with a clue. I'm
hopeful they will see the logic in what we do. However... So, if you use
GeekTools, and get a response that says that we are on their "banned
list", you'll know why. They invite email to [email protected]
Feel free to communicate with them.

If you downloaded the source, and run your own, you should not suffer
from our problems. Then again, we can't control what you do with the
proxy, which means that we can't put any limits on your potential for
abuse - which is a "bad thing(tm)".

It was nice to be on the net in the "good old days".
-- 
Rodney Joffe
CenterGate Research Group, LLC.
http://www.centergate.com
"Technology so advanced, even we don't understand it!"(SM)