We've got a whois CGI on our website for customers to do WHOIS queries.
Recently a customer tried to do a WHOIS, and got back the following
message:

 Welcome to the NSI Registrar Whois Server.

 The IP address from which you have visited the NSI Registrar WHOIS database 
 is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed to abide by
 Network Solutions' Whois policy.  Failure to abide by this policy can adversely
 impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS 
 requests.

 If you are trying to complete an individual Whois query, you may go directly to
 the NSI Registrar's Whois lookup, and try your inquiry again.

 To use the NSI Registrar's Whois lookup, click on or copy and paste the 
 following URL into your browser:

 http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/

 If you feel that you have received this message in error, please contact us at 
 1-888-642-9675 or (703)-742-0914, or via e-mail at
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]  

So, basically, Netsol has blacklisted our IP address, and now we can't
lookup addresses registered at Netsol.  The droid I spoke with said that
you're blacklisted if you generate more than 5000 WHOIS queries a day from
the same IP address.  But I checked our logs, and it's not even close to
that.  On a good day, we generate maybe 50-100 queries, and not all of them
are directed at Netsol's servers.  (btw, our whois query script is renamed
nightly to keep bots from abusing it)

I've been trying to get this resolved for close to a week now, and keep
getting the run-around at Netsol.  "This issue has been escalated", "sorry,
we don't see your domain registered with us (duh!)," and, my favorite "did
you try using our WHOIS web page?"

Has anyone else run into this?  If so, what did you have to do to convince
them to de-blacklist you?

-k

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