[db-wg] running in whios-circles...?

In message <841e5d78-c466-c95b-a9cc-9f1ce2187533 at geier.ne.tz>, 
Frank Habicht <geier at geier.ne.tz> wrote:

>So, I tend to believe that I'm on the wrong list here, because my
>question turns out to be:
>    can I trust whois.iana.org ?

The answer is:  yes and no.

Data returned by the whois.iana.org WHOIS server is good and correct
for some things only.  In particular, it provides good and useful data
when queried for information about top-level domains such as BIZ,
or ZA, or FR or whatever.  The information it returns when queried
about number resources is however rather hopelessly inaccurate, and
only occasionally correct, owing largely to the very substantial
number of inter-RIR transfers that have taken place over time.

>am i right to be confused by the iana answer?

Yes.

>who should get 'encouraged' to change something?

Well, good luck with that.  I asked the IANA folks some long time ago
now to fix the issue.  They apparently have no interest in doing so.

For my part, I have built my own set of WHOIS-like tools that nowadays
avoid querying the whois.iana.org WHOIS server altogether and which
instead steer queries about number resources to one of of the five 
RIR WHOIS servers based on the content of the daily-updated RIR "stats"
files.


Regards,
rfg