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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical [off-list] Re: High volume WHOIS queries
On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 09:17:48AM -0500, Hannigan, Martin wrote: > I don't know that this is the case, I suspect it's > resource management. If the database is getting > slaughtered by applications on uncontrolled auto pilot, > it's unusable for the rest of us. Understood. So why not make it easy -- both for yourselves and for everyone else? Just publish all WHOIS data on static web pages -- not even marked up with HTML, just plain ASCII text -- whose URLs are easy to construct, a la www.verisign.com/foo/bar/blah/example1.com www.verisign.com/foo/bar/blah/example2.net and refresh them from backing store whenever the "real" data changes. (And yes, I realize I'm using an example based on domains, not networks, but I trust it's still applicable.) This makes the load on the servers about as small as it's going to get. (Heck, they could be served from a cut-down web server designed to serve static content only.) It also makes it trivially easy for people to look things up without worrying about rate-limiting. Heck, once the search engines indexed it, it'd be even easier. As to "...then the spammers will mass-harvest it...": they already HAVE. They're busy selling it to each other on CD/DVD and via other means. This has been going on for years, and however-they're-doing-it, they're doing it well enough to acquire recently-modified data. So that toothpaste is completely out of the tube and there's no way to put it back in. I don't think any substantive purpose is served by pretending/wishing that it's otherwise: there's a demand for this data, and plenty of money to be made by those who will supply it, therefore it's going to be acquired and sold. But the people who *can't* access the data -- not without taking measures to evade the rate-blocking that's in place -- are abuse victims who are trying to track down those responsible. So I view the problem of overload on WHOIS servers as self-inflicted damage, easily fixed by giving up the pretense that restricting access to the data has any real value for anyone. (Well, it *does* benefit those selling it, but I trust that ensuring their profits isn't a goal that anyone's particularly worried about. ;-) ) ---Rsk
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