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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical High volume WHOIS queries
I'm in a disagreement with ARIN about my application for bulk whois data. I've got a software program that needs resolve AS numbers to the Company Name of the owner. The software app has need to do this on a very high volume. E.g. I run a report that returns the top 100 AS destinations for my network and I want to resolve the numbers to the names as part of the report generation. Since ARIN throttles the number of queries that you can execute against their servers I seems to "just make sense" that you would do the processing using local data. That is all fine and good, but the problem comes when I distribute the software to users. ARIN's AUP for bulk whois states: "Redistributing bulk ARIN WHOIS data is explicitly forbidden. It is permissible to publish the data on an individual query or small number of queries at a time basis, as long as reasonable precautions are taken to prevent automated querying by database harvesters." My original AUP application stated that I would transfer the data to the users using an XML file on a regular basis. Clearly in violation of the first point. Fine. But now after a phone conversation they are telling me that I can not operate a server to distribute the data on a "per query" basis too. Providing a server that answers whois queries just like ARIN seems to be clearly permissible based on the remaining AUP verbage. At this point the only thing I can get out of the guy/gal on the phone is "NO!". Does anyone have any experience doing something like this? How about a sanity check? Am I completely wrong in how I'm interpreting the AUP? Thanks, Dan |