Hi Rodney, Would support from a RIPE LIR be sufficient to keep the service up ?
I'm pretty sure there isn't a requirement to register for a LIR membership if this is the only usage. As a RIPE LIR, we can have a look at what the options are if that would help. Have a good new year, Regards, Erik Bais A2B Internet Verstuurd vanaf mijn iPad Op 31 dec. 2012 om 16:41 heeft Rodney Joffe <rjo...@centergate.com> het volgende geschreven: > NANOG and ARIN Friends, > > 14 Years ago, at the suggestion of Jon Postel and some of the early > participants in NANOG, we developed the GeekTools Whois proxy to make it > easier for *us* - network security and abuse techs - to deal with the > expanding number of gtlds and registrars and the varied whois servers that > were appearing. The service had both a CLI and web interface. > > The service also led directly to the creation of whois-servers.net, which now > seems to be part of a number of *nix distributions. > > The service has been up for 14 years, and over that time we have fulfilled > the requirements of all of the whois server operators in regards to > minimizing and stopping abuse of the GT whois proxy by domain scrapers, > spammers, etc, while enabling the security folks to do their jobs. In some > cases we have even written code to pass the ip address of the requestor to > the whois server registry operator when they wanted to manage quota's > directly. We think we have a really good relationship with all of the whois > server operators, and I think we provide a useful service to the community, > and is widely used. And in 14 years we have never been tarred as an enabler > of abuse of "the whois" system. > > There has obviously never been any kind of charge or fee for using the proxy, > or any of the other tools on GeekTools. In about 2002 we started placing a > banner ad on the web interface page to offset some of the costs for the > bandwidth that the proxy consumes. An average of about $70 a month for over > the last 10 years. Actual bandwidth costs are higher than that of course, but > it was a thought in 2002 that we had frankly forgotten about until recently. > > Two weeks ago RIPE-NCC, who provide the whois data for IP addresses in the > RIPE region, informed us that based on decisions by their members, as of > January 1st 2013, tomorrow, they would no longer provide whois proxy query > response services to GeekTools unless we ponied up $1,800 a year for RIPE > membership. > > I don't work very well above layer 7. It is what it is. So I wanted to let > you know that as of midnight tonight, apparently, you won't be able to use > GeekTools for RIPE related queries. If you have automated scripts, and you > are one of the users who has expanded access to GeekTools, you'll need to > find an alternative for RIPE queries *today*. My guess is that you will be > able to query RIPE directly, once you have worked out that the address space > is within RIPE's assignments. > > I think its wrong to have to pay for whois data that is part of a community > resource . So I won't do it.
