chris wrote:
Dear Agoston,
For your case, specifically, you should take care of the following:
- always use the flags "-rR" to avoid querying for private date and avoid using "-B";
- do not query for person, role, ... objects - only internet resources like inetnum or aut-num;
Thanks a lot for these very helpful hints! I realized that -rR does exactly what I was looking for. Correct me if I am wrong: Using -rR implies that I comply to your second point, doesn't it?
Yes the -r flag will prevent person objects being returned with your query results. You only need -R if you are querying for forward domain objects to prevent referral queries to domain registries. But this information is unreliable and will be removed from the RIPE Database soon.
If you keep yourself to this, there is absolutely no problem firing 20K queries a day.
Great, that's good news. However, I realized that there are two additional problems:
1) I also would like to query IP addresses of other RIRs. No matter what IP address I choose, my whois client (jwhois) always queries ARIN first, which redirects to the correct RIR. Since I'd like to avoid these redirects, my idea is to use the -h (host) option (e.g., -h whois.ripe.net) and vary the option depending on which IP address I query. I would use [1] as source to vary this parameter. Do you see any problems doing so?
You may find this list is not exactly up to date. There are some ranges that are moved from one RIR to another. For example we recently moved some more legacy ranges from RIPE to AfriNIC. But you can handle these exceptions when you find them.
2) As I mentioned already, RIPE whois policies are very transparent compared to other RIRs' ones. Whereas -rR works seamlessly for RIPE, it does not work for other RIRs (which is at least unfortunate). As I have to vary parameters for the whois call anyway (see 1), I could also switch off -rR for other RIRs. However, this would query personal data from other RIRs. Although this is not RIPE business now, is there any good practice in complying also to the whois policies of other RIRs?
APNIC and AfriNIC run similar whois code as RIPE. These flags may work with their systems. For ARIN and LACNIC you will have to check with them about their options and limits. Regards Denis Walker
Thanks again for helping out.
Cheers, Chris
[1]: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml