Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN???s Directory Services)

[David Conrad via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Aug 28, 2026, at 5:28 AM, Nick Hilliard via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> John R. Levine via NANOG wrote on 23/08/2026 23:22:
> > It occurs to me that if people REALLY REALLY want WHOIS, it would not
> > be terribly hard to write a proxy that puts a WHOIS front end on RDAP
> > servers.
>
> Or even simpler:
>
> $ brew install rdap
> $ echo alias whois rdap >> ~/.bashrc
> $ . ~/.bashrc


While I definitely agree that RDAP is vastly preferable to Whois, care may be warranted here. Aliasing whois to rdap 
will (may?) work for address lookups, a large number of ccTLDs do not support RDAP (of course, some don’t even support 
Whois either) and some TLDs (both cc and g) block IPs, e.g., from cloud providers or, oddly, residential ISP blocks.  

(I’ll spare everyone the rants about the degradation of the usefulness of registration databases and the increasing 
insanity of IP block lists)

Regards,
-drc

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