Re: whois queries with respect to RIPE policies

[Agoston Horvath agoston@localhost]

Dear Chris,

There is only one way to get permanently banned by the RIPE DB: repeatedly
ignoring its error messages. All other oversteps of limits result in a
warning message only, one that users can and should react on.

For your case, specifically, you should take care of the following:

- always use the flags "-rR" to avoid querying for private date and avoid
using "-B";

- do not query for person, role, ... objects - only internet resources
like inetnum or aut-num;

- If querying the RIPE DB in parallel, you should take care not to open
more than 4 connections to whois at the same time.

If you keep yourself to this, there is absolutely no problem firing 20K
queries a day.

As suggested by Florian earlier, if you have high volumes of queries,
though, you should consider using the split files available on the ftp
site. There is no exact definition of "high volume", as it also depends on
what our servers can handle. At the moment I would say we will probably
ask you to consider using split files if you have more than a couple
hundred thousand queries a day.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Kind regards,
Agoston Horvath
Database Group
RIPE NCC

On 2010-01-27 11:46 AM, chris wrote:
> Florian, thanks for your reply.
> 
>>> Would you please share your experiences, and maybe even give hints about
>>> a 'correct' usage of a whois client?
>>
>> What type of objects do you need?  If inetnum:s and route:s are
>> sufficient, you could use the database dump on ftp.ripe.net.
> I'd like to get as much information out of whois as possible, without
> breaking the RIPE policies. Downloading the dump via FTP is an option,
> yes, but as I wrote I'd prefer to avoid it. The main reasons for this
> are that a) parsing this database is not very convenient and b) I'd need
> to synchronize also with the other RIRs.
> 
> Chris
>