[db-wg] whois referrals for transferred netblocks, was Re: NWI-10 Definition of Country

George Michaelson via db-wg <db-wg at ripe.net> wrote:

> As a point of information, APNIC uses cc "ZZ" specifically for
> unallocated and "stub" (outward transferred) records.
>
> ZZ is an ISO3166 assigned code for "unknown"

Which reminds me of some of the more horrible code I have shipped.

FreeBSD's whois client tries to know as little as possible about which
whois server it needs to ask for which query, and instead starts from IANA
and follows referrals. This works surprisingly well given that there isn't
a standard for whois referrals and there are at least 5 referral formats
out there.

The main point where this strategy fails is for IP address queries,
because RIPE and APNIC only say "dunno" rather than providing a referral.
This is kind of annoying since I believe they have the necessary
information and expose it via RDAP, but omit it via whois. So the whois
client guesses that ARIN might be more helpful and in horrible cases might
try all the RIRs in turn. Yuck.

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/whois/whois.c?revision=326025&view=markup#l124

Tony.
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