A new type of referral

On Monday, 15 Nov 1999, Engin Gunduz writes:

Dear Engin Gunduz

We appreciate your efforts and consider your proposal a good
idea. Looking forward to get it implemented asap. The
CLIENTADDRESS will enable us to limit time and number of
queries from referral servers by using a wrapper we wrote
around our WHOIS that has configurable access mechanisms
based on IP addresses.

The background for all this is mainly privacy: people are
currently using all means to get access to addresses
of Internet users (mostly for spamming purposes). One 
means is querying RIPE's Josh because such queries
could not be limited until now by the authoritative WHOIS 
server due to lack of detailed information (we would 
have had to limit the entire Josh).

We also encourage other registries to configure their
WHOIS servers to allow referral queries by RIPE
and let their own WHOIS server answer authoritatively.


Marcel


>  We will be implementing a new type of referral, to be used
> to forward the querying client's IP address to the referred
> whois server along with the query. Until now, there was no
> way to let the referred whois server know the IP address
> of the actual whois client, rendering the usage of an ACL
> impossible without blocking all referred queries, on the side
> of the referred whois server.

> Briefly,

>   o A fourth kind of referral will be defined, CLIENTADDRESS (The other
> three were RIPE, INTERNIC and SIMPLE).
>   o The IP address of the client will be sent to the referred whois
> server, if the referral type is CLIENTADDRESS.
>   o The IP address will be sent using the -V flag. The version and the IP
> address will be separated by a comma (eg,  -Vripe2.3.1,193.140.45.45).
>   o No other flag will be forwarded to the referred whois server.
>   o When the server gets such a request, it will check the IP number of
> the server which does the referral against a list of authorized whois
> servers. If it is not in the list, it will be rejected.
>   o Then, the IP address of the client will be extracted from the -V flag 
> string and it will be regarded as if it is the IP address of a directly
> querying whois client (ie, it is checked against the list of
> DENYWHOISACESS list).


>   Please let us know about your ideas and comments regarding this issue,


> Regards,

> Engin Gunduz
> RIPE NCC
> DB Group