[ppml] Directory Services - Take 2

[william(at)elan.net]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:

> Michael,
>
> 	while i will not disagree about the desire for retiring
> 	said protocol, you seem confused about WHOIS vs RWHOIS.
>
> WHOIS is ancient, creaking - with various bodies building incompatable
> 	shims/expectations on this (excessively) flexible protocol.
> 	My mail archives(*) do not see when the last supported/maintained
> 	change was made to the whois protocol so that would be pre 1994.
> 	(no that does not count the tweeks various folks have made to
> 	try and "standardise" the query type or return string... with
> 	only slightly more success than attempts to standardize the
> 	format of the DNS TXT rr type...)

Despite that, whois is heavily by all registries and rwhois is not 
used for anything more then ip database access for some ARIN ISPs
who do not want to swip their data directly to ARIN.

> (pop quiz... which is more extensible, whois or finger?)
>
> rWHOIS, on the other hand, is a decade or so younger than the venerable
> 	WHOIS... and is maintained and supported.  e.g.

Bill,

Arent you confused below about support and development of the protocol
and support of the particular server/client implementation (considerd to 
be reference implementation) of this protocol?

There are lots and lots of whois servers (like say ripedb) that are 
maintained as well and are updated a lot more often ...

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 16:07:46 -0400
> Subject: [ANN] rwhoisd-1.5.9.5 and rwhoisd-1.5.10-pre5
> List-Id: General user list for the RWhois protocol and reference software
>        <rwhois.rwhois.net>
> Hello folks,
>
> This  is a bug fix release containing Joe Pruett's IPv4 formatting
> fix.  These versions are recommended over previous releases.
>
> Just a reminder: the main difference between the 1.5.9.x series and
> the 1.5.10 series is the NETBLOCK index type, which allows the
> indexer to index off-boundary network block ranges (or just allow you
> to specify everything in network ranges rather than CIDR notation).
> Feedback on the 1.5.10 releases would be appreciated.
>
> Anyway, get them at:
>
> <http://www.rwhois.net/ftp/rwhoisd-1.5.9.5.tar.gz>
> <http://www.rwhois.net/ftp/rwhoisd-1.5.10-pre5.tar.gz>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 	other comments (thanks Lea) wrt over specification of
> 	implementation details are spot on.  IMHO of course.
>
> * most of the mail archives are swapped out... on old media types that
> are tough to get support/drivers for ... :(
>
> --bill
>

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net