[dbwg] WHOIS Change Announcement

[Tim Christensen]

A change to ARIN's WHOIS service was implemented today, 7/16/2003, as 
previously announced in http://www.arin.net/mailing_lists/dbwg/0425.html

A description of the change follows:

Based on feedback from the most recent DBWG meeting at ARIN XI, ARIN
staff has made minor modifications to the way organization data is
displayed in WHOIS. These changes are released as of 16-Jul-2003.

For organizations with Rwhois servers, ARIN appends an Rwhois
server information field to the organization information displayed in
whois. The whois display uses the label "ReferralServer:" and
its URL value.

Acceptable values are:

ReferralServer: rwhois://192.0.2.11:4321/
ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.arin.net:4321/
ReferralServer: rwhois.example.net:4321
ReferralServer: rwhois://whois.example.com:43/

Invalid values include:

ReferralServer: rwhois.arin.net
ReferralServer: http://whois.example.net:80/

Since the Referral Server is an attribute of the Org, it will be include
as part of the Org display. Example:

OrgName:    Example, Inc.
OrgID:      EXAMPLE
Address:    123 Main Street
City:       Chantilly
StateProv:  VA
PostalCode: 20152
Country:    US
Comment:
RegDate:    1998-04-03
Updated:    2002-11-05

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.example.net:4321/
...

If there is a ReferralServer, it will be displayed on org, net and AS
queries.  If no ReferralServer exists for the Org, no label will appear.

The Referral Server field exists on the Org-Simple and Org-Detailed 
templates.  See those templates for further information on using the 
Referral Server field.  These templates can be found at 
http://www.arin.net/library/templates/org-detailed.txt and 
http://www.arin.net/library/templates/org-simple.txt.

As previously mentioned, comments containing RWhois information have not 
been removed from the network records that contained them.  Comments may be 
removed from individual network records at the contacts' discretion by 
either submitting a template with 'Public Comments: NONE', or if the 
comments are on many records, by submitting an ad hoc request to hostmaster 
to remove them.

Regards,
Tim Christensen
Database Administrator
American Registry for Internet Numbers