(ICANN). ICANN, in turn, provides some of these assignments to the RIRs, which
are responsible for different regions in the world. The following are the RIRs that
exist in the world today:
•
African Network Information Center
(AfriNIC) is responsible for Africa.
•
American Registry for Internet Numbers
(ARIN) is responsible for North Amer‐
ica, Antarctica, and parts of the Caribbean.
•
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
(APNIC) is responsible for Asia, Aus‐
tralia, New Zealand, and other neighboring countries.
•
Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre
(LACNIC) is responsi‐
ble for Central and South America as well as parts of the Caribbean.
•
Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre
(RIPE NCC) is responsible
for Europe, Russian, the Middle East, and central Asia.
The RIRs manage IP addresses for these regions as well as AS numbers. The AS num‐
bers are needed by companies for their routing. Each AS number is assigned to a net‐
work large enough to be sharing routing information with internet service providers
and other organizations. AS numbers are used by the Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP), which is the routing protocol used across the internet. Within organizations,
other routing protocols including Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) are typically used,
but BGP is the protocol used to share routing tables from one AS to another.
Using whois
To get information from any of the RIRs, we can use the
whois
utility. This command-
line program comes with any distribution of Linux. Using
whois
, we can identify
owners of network blocks.
Example 3-13
shows a
whois
query looking for the owner
of the network 8.9.10.0. The response shows us who was provided the entire block.
What you see in this example is a large address block. Blocks this large either belong
to companies that have had them since the first addresses were handed out or may
belong to service providers.
Example 3-13. whois query of a network block
root@rosebud:~# whois 8.9.10.0
#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#
# If you see inaccuracies in the results, please report at
# https://www.arin.net/public/whoisinaccuracy/index.xhtml
#
