RDAP Explorer
Posted on 06 February 2017 in Technology • Tagged with django, ip, ipv4, ipv6, ipwhois, nginx, python, rdap, uwsgi, whois
Having fallen behind a bit on Takeout Inspector, the 12 Years of Gmail series and some other projects, I decided to try to put something very simple together from beginning to end and actually launch it. One of my previous posts, Examining the Remnants of a Small DDoS Attack introduced me to the Python package ipwhois and the alternative WHOIS system RDAP. This eventually led me to a quick and simple project called RDAP Explorer...
What is RDAP?
According to APNIC
The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is an alternative to WHOIS for accessing Internet resource registration data. RDAP is designed to address a number of shortcomings in the existing Whois service. The most important changes are:
- Standardization of queries and responses
- Internationalization considerations to cater for languages other than English in data objects
- Redirection capabilities to allow seamless referrals to other registries
The most important advantage of RDAP over WHOIS is the Standardization of queries and responses. While reviewing a large set of IP addresses, I found it rather difficult to deal with non-standard (and sometimes nonsensical) output of WHOIS queries. Mostly they were easy enough to parse, but the odd balls made the process annoying and time consuming …
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