>Number:         8938
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       whois program should be replaced with whois++ or equivalent
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    bin-bug-people (Utility Bug People)
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Fri Dec  3 01:24:00 1999
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Erik E. Fair
>Organization:
International Organization of Internet Clock Watchers
>Release:        1.4.1
>Environment:
	
System: NetBSD digital.clock.org 1.3 NetBSD 1.3 (DIGITAL) #1: Mon May 25 14:16:49 PDT 1998 fair@digital.clock.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/DIGITAL sparc


>Description:
	The whois program queries whois.networksolutions.com by
	default. This single server does not return complete data
	from all the DNS registries.

	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.

	As an alternative, we could have an LDAP client that can
	do the same thing, since that seems to be the trendy
	directory protocol these days, despite its ASiNine protocol
	design.

	This all depends on what the different registries decide
	to implement to make their data available.

	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.

>How-To-Repeat:
	
>Fix:
	
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: