We are all familiar with whois.ripe.net and whois.arin.net and the other whois services of the other RIRs. It allows us to know who has been assigned the IP address in question and if needed, it gives us an initial pointer in how to contact the "IP leaser" in case some network problem has arisen that would involve them.
Unfortunately, the whois server for the DoD - whois.nic.mil no longer exists and therefore large chunks of active IP address space are unknown. For example:
138.138.0.0/16
158.0.0.0/13
[I am sure others can make an exhaustive list]. http://www.nic.mil/ used to have an online whois service which is also no longer accessible.
I have contacted the RIRs and they admit there is a problem here that they can't solve.
Based on http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space I would assume IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization having IP space from them must operate an accessible whois server.
So is there anyone out in NANOG-land that has a solution?
Thanks,
Hank
Hank,
I have contacted the RIRs and they admit there is a problem here that they can't solve.
I'm not sure I understand the problem. Given the US military is in the ARIN region, why wouldn't the right answer here be "look it up in ARIN's database and send mail to the listed contact"?
Based on IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry I would assume IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization having IP space from them must operate an accessible whois server.
This hasn't been a requirement in the past. In the future, it is highly likely the IANA registry will be pointing to the RIRs responsible for the region in which the address space has be assigned.
Rgds,
-drc
* Hank Nussbacher:
Based on IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry I would
assume IANA might be interested in mandating that any organization
having IP space from them must operate an accessible whois server.
For new address space, I agree. I'm not sure if it's worth the
trouble to create a policy for this. Presumably, this is all about
legacy allocations which hardly change, so anyone could compile a
machine-readable list and have them put into the popular clients.
(I assume you mean information such as "this netblock has been given
to that organization", not meaningful WHOIS for sub-allocations.)