[ On Friday, December 3, 1999 at 01:17:29 (-0800), Erik E. Fair wrote: ]
> Subject: bin/8938: whois program should be replaced with whois++ or equivalent
>
> 	There was a project to replace the WHOIS protocol with
> 	WHOIS++ which could conduct distributed queries against
> 	multiple DNS registries (e.g. whois.nic.ddn.mil, whois.ripe.net)
> 	to obtain a complete search for a given query, rather than
> 	force the user to issue multiple queries against different
> 	WHOIS servers for requested data. I don't know if this
> 	deployed or not.

So far as I've seen there's not much available for WHOIS++.

Rwhois works for a small number of registries (NSI's being the important
one from this continent), but it's not properly deployed either.  Even
NSI's rwhois database seems to have date problems (or maybe that's in
the client server? -- I see "domain:Created:20190129050000000" and
"domain:Updated:19181231050000000" and similar for some records) and the
data in it is always out of date.  Not to mention that it's really slow
too!

In the mean time I've written and been using for some time a little
shell script that tries to be relatively smart about where it looks for
data:

	ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/awhois.sh

It's not perfect, and by its nature it has a lot of magic knowledge
encoded within it, but it works quite well for me!  ;-)

> 	The quicker we get this done, the quicker Network Solutions
> 	(a misnomer if there ever was one) will have their richly
> 	deserved fate befall them.

I don't know if NetBSD's fix to "whois" will have this effect, but....  :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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