2006-05-08 - News - Chris Thompson
There are situations in which there is a requirement for non-interactive access to the IP registration database. A new method of using the web interface has been provided, in which cookies with a long life can be downloaded and used to authenticate subsequent non-interactive https access, for example by using programs such as curl.
See the download-cookie page on Jackdaw
for a more complete description of the scheme. At the moment only the
list_ops page can be used with downloaded cookies for the ipreg
realm, and it requires a certain amount of reverse engineering to be
used with a non-interactive tool. Pages more suitable for this sort of
use may be provided later in the light of experience. The current
state is quite experimental and we would ask anyone planning to use it
in production to let us know.
Some departments and colleges are using firewall software written by Ben McKeegan at Netservers Ltd., which interacts with the IP registration database using the old method of authentication via an Oracle account password. A version of this software that uses downloaded cookies as described above is under development and we hope it will be available soon.
For several reasons we want to restrict the number of people who have SQL-level access to the underlying Oracle database, and there has been a recent purge of unused Oracle accounts. If you have good reason to need such access to the IP registration part of the database, please let us know.