Posts Tagged ‘whois’

Whois-related irritation

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Responsibility for the African IP ranges was transferred to AfriNIC what, four years ago, right? So why is it that some services that use the whois data still ignore the AfricNIC whois data? The result of this is that they believe that all African IP addresses are in Mauritius. If you’re on a South African IP, you can see this with, for example, the WhatsMyIP.org service by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org/more/ and looking at the “Whois Lookup” information.

Also, Netcraft should really know better. Check out the Netcraft information for the UCT website. It’s not like this information hasn’t been around for a while; all the open-source whois tools started using the AfriNIC server long ago. (I myself submitted the bug and patch for FreeBSD.) So really, they need to get with the program.

Update: I may have maligned Netcraft unfairly. Although they get the UCT information wrong, most SA sites do show up correctly. SAIX, for example. I’ve sent them a bug report.