[27510] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Alternatives (was Re: whois broke again?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Mon Feb 21 18:44:03 2000
Message-ID: <38B1582E.F51BF919@greendragon.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:22:47 -0500
From: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
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Rodney Joffe wrote:
> A totally new from scratch database needs to be created. And it should
> *not* be me, GeekTools, or CenterGate. Or any individual. It needs to be
> controlled by a body trusted by all. What ICANN should have and could
> have been.
>
Trust has to start somewhere. If you, GeekTools, or CenterGate, are
not willing to be trustworthy, then I guess we need to find somewhere
else. I never expected ICANN to be a trusted entity. It's a
stalking horse -- by design.
How about Bill Manning at ISI?
> whois-servers.net may be more appropriate, and it is already in at least
> 2 of the BSD distributions for whois :-)
>
I use OpenBSD, which has the modifications. I had had high hopes
for whois-servers.net, but it has not solved any problems. Perhaps
I don't understand how it works?
It seems to require a domain to register itself in whois-servers.net
(for example, nasa.gov.whois-servers.net) and maintain its own whois
server. This is pretty much a non-starter for most domains. And it
doesn't aggregate information to eliminate single points of failure.
What I am suggesting is a set of redundant servers, A.whois-servers.net,
B.whois-servers.net, etc., that mirror each other's data, eliminating
single points of failure.
While I think that Bill Manning's DNS TXT suggestion is clever, and
nicely distributed, it requires a lot of effort.
I'm suggesting a low effort technique to collect the information that
exists. That is, to use the actual whois searches that are done,
collecting the results in a new database, accessible by existing tools,
or minor modifications of tools.
Let's discuss the alternatives, and get busy.
WSimpson@UMich.edu
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