Re: Delegations for whois servers.

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Hello there,

   the recent revision of network delegations I recently undertook
   in a commit, only rather large address chunks were updated. Now I
   learned about ERX, Early Registration Transfer, where the first
   few years of this century witnessed a large scale splitting,
   and ensuing transfer to new authorities, of the old B-class
   and C-class IP-ranges. I was made aware of this matter for APNIC.

   I need advice as to the desirability to implement these in our
   file `whois/ip_del_list'. It would mean entering a lot of 16-bit
   ranges down to 24-bit ranges, shattered rather arbitrarily over
   the old classes. Clearly, this would improve the usability of
   our WHOIS client, but also increase its size due to hardcoded
   delegation data. I noticed the issue when my client included in
   OpenIndiana provided me with more relevant answers than did our client.

What is the size increase in rough numbers? I'm not sure it is worth
to worry about it unless we are talking about several thousands of
kilobytes.

   Another question: The client found in Solaris offers a program
   switch directing the query to Route Arbiter Database (whois.radb.net)
   where large amounts of information on numeric networks are
   easily available. Would you welcome a similar addition to
   our client?

If you think it is useful, I see why not.  I can't really say I use
whois that much to have a good grasp on what would be a useful feature
or not.