[43633] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: whois syntax
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Sat Oct 20 19:16:39 2001
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 16:15:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@exigengroup.com>
To: Joe Abley <jabley@automagic.org>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20011020081428.Z92370@buffoon.automagic.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10110201612080.31094-100000@arch.exigengroup.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
A well-defined and widely implemented query language to large volumes of
data organized into tables does, in fact, exist.
It is called SQL.
I guess all that whois silliness is an acute case of NIH syndrome.
--vadim
On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Joe Abley wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 01:53:04PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Joe Abley wrote:
> >
> > > > There is no standard specified in the RFC for output, just for query
> > > > language.
> >
> > > Is RFC954 a standard in any real sense? Seems to me that the RFC2026
> > > designation for that document would be "Historic", although RFC954 is
> > > old enough that it is not labelled with a maturity level.
> >
> > Well, the process is standardizes is so simple and flexible there
> > obviously hasn't been any need to change the past 16 years:
>
> The original comment was that the *query language* is standardised.
> RFC954 digresses beyond the trivial protocol you mentioned to specify
> lookup behaviour which is, in practice, entirely implementation-specific.
>
> > > production *IR/IRR/registry/registrar whois servers is (a) that they
> > > all let you look stuff up, and (b) they all listen on 43/tcp.
> >
> > Isn't trying to standardize the output of whois servers is like trying to
> > standardize the output of HTTP servers? Since this output is for human
> > consumtion (well, after HTML parsing in the case of HTTP) standardizing
> > has very few benefits.
>
> s/Since/If/
>
> Scripts consume the output of whois servers, too. Ask abuse@$isp
> (and witness the energy that went into RIPE-181 and later RPSL to
> make the results of queries parsable).
>
>
> Joe
>
