[db-wg] New RIPE Whois Database Manual

Andre,

Andre Koopal wrote:

>On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 05:25:04PM +0200, Daniel Roesen wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 12:21:09PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>>2 - "e-mail" field of the IRT object
>>>>Why would you want to hide the "e-mail" field of the IRT object by 
>>>>default (forcing the use of -B to get it) ?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Because of morons writing scripts which send mail to every address they
>>>see.
>>>      
>>>
>>Those morons will just add -B to their scripts.
>>
>>    
>>
>Which reminds me, why is the hint to use -B in the output of whois. That makes
>it very easy to find out.
>  
>
IIRC, the idea was never to hide the attributes filtered by default. The
idea was to avoid people doing:

$ whois -h whois.ripe.net 1.2.3.4 | grep @

And e-mailing a bunch of useless addresses.

We include the comment about -B because this was the first time that the
default output of the Whois server was changed to modify the contents of
objects. I thought it was very important that people be able to know how
to get the original, unmodified objects.

A few data points:

Date        Total queries  -B queries            Total IP's  -B IP's
2005-10-23        2139305       58973   2.8%         45069      1143   2.5%
2005-10-24        2237340       72880   3.3%         51970      1346   2.6%
2005-10-25        2569724      170948   6.7%         49852      1521   3.1%
2005-10-26        2562303       98482   3.8%         52478      1526   2.9%

A relatively small percentage of queries actually uses the -B flag, and
these queries come from a relatively small percentage of IP addresses. I
also looked at the counts of objects returned, and found them to be
roughly similar.

(The number "-B" queries is actually an overcount, because I just looked
for "B" anywhere in the query string, but a quick look shows that almost
all occurrences of "B" are for the flag. The number of IP's is an
undercount, because we get a lot of queries from www.ripe.net, and I
didn't convert these to the original client IP address. This is for both
the total and the -B.)

The message that I take from this is that when you put data in the
database, you can assume that most users will get the default output.

--
Shane
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