[anti-abuse-wg] whois.afrinic.net down or in maint mode (refuses all connections)

Wilfried Woeber wrote, On 10/21/2012 12:58 PM:
> U.Mutlu wrote:
>
>> FYI: whois.afrinic.net is down or is in maintenance mode as it refuses
>> all connections
>
> Thanks for letting us know!
>
> Out of curiosity -
> did you check with them whether it was planned or is it just an outage?

Unfortunately I haven't contacted them - I should have done it.
In their mailing list archives on the web the last announcement
for a planned maintenance was back in Feb 2012 (s.b.),
so the recent outage could be a network problem (DoS attack etc).


BTW, ARIN is best prepared for whois server attacks as they operate
multiple whois servers under the same hostname (whois.arin.net),
all the other RIR's seem to operate each just one whois server.
I would suggest RIPE to add at least a second whois server.

# nslookup whois.arin.net
Name:   whois.arin.net
Address: 199.71.0.48
Address: 199.71.0.46
Address: 199.212.0.48
Address: 199.212.0.46
Address: 199.212.0.47
Address: 199.71.0.47

# nslookup whois.ripe.net
Name:   whois.ripe.net
Address: 193.0.6.135

# nslookup whois.apnic.net
Name:   whois.apnic.net
Address: 202.12.29.220

# nslookup whois.lacnic.net
whois.lacnic.net        canonical name = lacnic.net.
Name:   lacnic.net
Address: 200.3.14.10

# nslookup whois.afrinic.net
Name:   whois.afrinic.net
Address: 196.216.2.130



########################
https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/announce/2012/000823.html
"
Dear Colleagues,

Starting Friday 17 Feb at 1400UTC, we shall be doing maintenance
works on the whois and MyAfriNIC services to take care of some key
upgrades.

This may continue through the entire weekend, during which time,
there could be intermittent lack of access to these services - which
should be fully restored by Sunday 19 Feb 2000 UTC.

Should you notice any issues, or if you have any concerns or
comments, please feel free to contact helpdesk at afrinic.net
"
########################