[HN Gopher] Evolution of Whois Protocol to RDAP (2019)
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       Evolution of Whois Protocol to RDAP (2019)
        
       Author : Eavolution
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2025-02-10 10:04 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.icann.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.icann.org)
        
       | elp wrote:
       | I'm currently updating my organization's RDAP system up to the
       | latest ICANN profile so please forgive me if I sound a little
       | salty.
       | 
       | What ICANN aren't admitting is that while there was no formal RFC
       | standard to the output of WHOIS ICANN themselves had mandated the
       | output format of the WHOIS output. To go live with your shiny new
       | gTLD you had to pass a test of your whois server output. It was
       | strict enough that we had to remove an extra blank line is the
       | disclaimer at the end of the output.
       | 
       | Every whois server I ever checked while writing my org's version
       | supported UTF8.
       | 
       | The data has to be publicly available so authentication and
       | encryption doesn't matter. In any case there is currently nothing
       | requiring RDAP servers to authenticate anything.
       | 
       | The amount of search ability I've seen in most rdap servers so
       | far is pretty limited.
       | 
       | The RDAP output is json but its complicated and there are so many
       | options that realistically everyone is developing to pass the
       | icann profile so no different to whois, and in the end we still
       | live in a post GDRP world so all the useful data is redacted so
       | none of this matters anyway.
        
         | mjl- wrote:
         | fwiw, i recently had a need for checking the registration date
         | of domains (to find the "age", for reputation purposes), and
         | getting the information from rdap was pretty simple: a few http
         | calls and parsing the response as json. i'll admit i didn't
         | look at implementing whois (since it seems to be on the way
         | out).
         | 
         | it works well, except that some cctlds (eg .io) don't provide
         | an rdap service yet. i think the reason being that icann
         | doesn't authority over cctlds.
         | 
         | i don't know how cctlds are run. i can imagine they would want
         | to provide this service, it seems pretty core to their
         | business. but perhaps there are reasons why rdap is hard for
         | them to implement?
         | 
         | (aside: i'm wondering why the article was posted. it isn't
         | recent, and is light on information).
        
           | Eavolution wrote:
           | I posted it a few days ago because the date specified to move
           | from whois to rdap was recent, and I am learning about
           | various network protocols at the minute and I found it
           | interesting.
        
       | comrade1234 wrote:
       | I've been using Whois every now and then to ban ip ranges outside
       | the USA where there is suspicious activity coming from.
       | 
       | The variety of responses is a lot. And it seems like you're not
       | required to provide accurate information other than just one
       | field (ipaddr or something like that). For example I'll see an
       | allocation that has over a million addresses but in their Whois
       | text they say they're a /24 network (256 addresses). This happens
       | with Chinese networks every single time so I have to calculate
       | the correct network...
       | 
       | (Sorry, commuting right now so I can't show examples here)
        
       | xiconfjs wrote:
       | The big problem there is no easy and consistent way to query RDAP
       | because there are no clients in Debian or Ubuntu. There is one in
       | the _experimental_ stage [1] in Debian, so perhaps in Debian 14?
       | 
       | And yes, I know, there are Perl-Apps [2], Go-Apps [3] and so on
       | which can be installed within minutes. But this extra step
       | (including debugging which happens when compiling/installing from
       | source) isn't going to help RDAP to get traction.
       | 
       | [1] https://packages.debian.org/experimental/rdap [2]
       | https://metacpan.org/pod/App::rdapper [3]
       | https://github.com/openrdap/rdap
        
         | elp wrote:
         | The new icann directive is that they suggest we shutdown whois.
         | So in theory at least there will be only RDAP. I'm guessing all
         | the distros will add something soon.
         | 
         | On the other hand my employer and I imagine most other
         | registries are not planning to shut off whois. Actual people in
         | the real world still use it.
        
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       (page generated 2025-02-13 23:02 UTC)