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

[Nick Hilliard via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

borg--- via NANOG wrote on 01/09/2026 08:39:
> Uh, first off all. Its not a service that needs constant babysitting.
> You set up it once and forget, probably forever.
>
> Second, its not 80s or 90s, compute is cheap.. very cheap.
> Are you saying that running such proxy is such a problem? I doubt it...

if it's a daemon running on the home server in your basement, you set it 
up once, then forget about it.

If it's a service run by an organisation like ARIN, you cost it, code it 
and run it as a formally supported service. You then monitor it and 
restart it when it falls over. You fix the occasional bug, keep the code 
up to date, and you need to take it into account when the underlying 
data store changes in any way. That includes looking at any part of the 
information stack sideways, because the more ancient the code base, the 
more fragile it is.  You then test it to make sure nothing breaks. You 
train people up on the lifecycle of the product and write documentation, 
both internal and external. You throw the codebase into CI, you run 
security audits on the code, and then you answer the security auditor's 
queries about it. Despite all that, it's still got some weird stuff 
going on inside it, and there's probably only a single person in the 
organisation who knows how it all works. Handling it consumes time at 
meetings, it consumes technical time and because it's public facing, 
everyone across the organisation - from the board to the helpdesk - 
needs to have some awareness of it. Then you multiply all that by 
something approximating 4 to handle the 4 different directory protocols 
which are exposed by ARIN, and it turns out that the costs to do this 
are not just non-zero, they're actually substantial.

The costs here are the direct costs of the technical debt incurred in 
supporting legacy products and systems. These costs can't be magicked 
away by declaring all this to be silly, or by claiming that whois 
doesn't need much compute, or by stating that this is all unnecessary 
overhead and it would be much simpler to put in a small proxy (just a 
little one) to do the job instead.

People running a service in their basement have the privilege of 
ignoring all this because if the service falls over, it doesn't matter. 
If you're an ARIN, proper support of externally facing protocols really 
does matter.

Nick

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