whois

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 02:17:14PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> The trouble is that there are at least *three* things going on...
> 
> 1.  The WHOIS RFC doesn't specify terribly much...
> 
> Merely that you connect to a server, on port 43, submit an object, and
> expect to get a text content reply.

Nice protocol.  Simple to implement, and hard to break.

> 2.  The Debian whois client is, indeed, very nice in that it knows
> that a whole lot of TLDs exist, and, for many (not all) of them, what
> server will provide relevant WHOIS results.  It's my favorite whois
> client for this reason...

The GNU whois client certainly does seem to be the best so far.

> 3.  As there is no standardization of the output, you can expect to
> get varying results from different WHOIS servers servicing different
> TLDs.  This is actually quite legitimate in view of the fact that
> different TLDs have different sets of policies...

I also VERY much hope it stays this way.  Many problems have been caused
by people trying to automatically harvest contact info from whois to
spam people.  The harder that is to automate, the better.

Len Sorensen
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