APNIC is pleased to announce changes to the APNIC Whois Database to provide a more stable and reliable service to the APNIC community, and to provide new and improved features.

APNIC is pleased to announce changes to the APNIC Whois Database to provide a more stable and reliable service to the APNIC community, and to provide new and improved features.

The APNIC Whois Database is the official record of organizations that hold Internet resources in the Asia Pacific region. It can be queried directly to determine the ISP responsible for a particular resource, which is important for instances of troubleshooting or law enforcement.

“Geoloc” and “language” attributes will be added to the inetnum and inet6num objects. These new features will allow our community members to provide geo-location hints to geo-service providers, so that users can find location information for registered resource holders. The “geoloc” attribute is a latitude/longitude coordinate pair, and the “language” attribute is a two-character language code, for example, “en”.

Another new feature will allow users to view previous versions of objects, enabling a historical view of how an object has been updated or changed. Colloquially known as “who was”, this feature allows users to query a previous version of resources and the dates the objects were changed. Using the query flag “—list-versions”, users can see how a specific object was changed over time. Similarly, “—show-version ” indicates a chosen previous version of a specific whois object.

While these changes provide added detail of whois data, particularly for law enforcement purposes, it does not apply to deleted objects and privacy protection means you cannot apply list versions to person or role objects.

Users will be able to test these new attributes via a test bed, which will be available with the new query server from Monday, 22 July 2013. From Monday, 5 August 2013, the new attributes will be available in the APNIC Whois Database to query, with evaluation of queries only being directed against the new servers from Monday, 19 August 2013. Up until this time, the whois database will have a mix of old and new query servers, which may result in error messages if the new “who was” query flags are used.

RDAP

Last year, APNIC began contributing to work on the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), which is a new service designed to address a number of shortcomings in the existing Whois service. RDAP is a suite of specifications currently under development under the IETF’s Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (WEIRDS), and addresses shortcomings such as:

• Lack of internationalization support
• No specification of queries, output, or error messages
• No referral mechanism
• No authentication mechanism

APNIC has made a pilot service available to test the RDAP protocol, and this will also be accessible on Monday, 5 August 2013 on the new whois query servers.

More information about RDAP can be found on the APNIC website.

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