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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Clarification: List of AS names by ASN?
I probably didn't word that last posting well. I don't accuse AS stats people of being spammers, its more that in an operational sense, grazing the whois database for AS information is probably going to look much like grazing the whois database for SPAM information, so our logfile checks may well block this class of access. That, and that there are substantive scaling and policy issues in how we make reliable, trustable, consistent data about AS and other address information accessible to the community when we have a small number of whois servers, all of which may be taking load. I doubt if NANOGers are capable of being suprised by anything, but it suprised me that whois is actually very heavily used. It didn't occur to me that firewall and spamblocking s/w would assume whois was able to answer their questions about where the source of the badstuff was coming from, and that this was automatable. That they ask both the wrong whois server (I hate to think about the load ARIN takes in respect of APNIC and RIPE data) and the wrong questions doesn't help much. In short, whois is a very limited use tool in this context, and automatic grazing of whois to mail back spammers is pretty broken right now and probably for the forseeable future, at least as long as whois data is semi voluntary. I don't see the kinds of trends in Internet governance which can help the data accuracy problem. What we can do is make the service more widely available, replicated, reliable at a machine level. I'm sensitive that APNIC has had more than its share of problems lately. We do realize its not (yet) a HA service, we do realize this is impacting on what people (including NANOGites) want to do. cheers -George -- George Michaelson | APNIC Email: [email protected] | PO Box 2131 Milton QLD 4064 Phone: +61 7 3367 0490 | Australia Fax: +61 7 3367 0482 | http://www.apnic.net
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