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?
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? 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? Thanks again for helping out. Cheers, Chris [1]: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml