Re: NZ whois server

Domainz was instructed by ISOCNZ to provide a RIPE format "whois" in November 1999. This was after months of procrastination, and wallying around prior to this. (I estimate March/April 1999 that Domainz was really told, but never mind. Formal Instruction was issued in November 1999, in response to protracted procrastination.) Domainz were very severely slapped around at the last ISOCNZ council meeting for non-compliance. This was all done long before the DRS system was specified. (in fact the DRS tender/responses pretty much ignores most of the stuff network engineers care about, which is another matter entirely.) So it is extremely rich for Domainz, or it's representatives to plead that the required RIPE "whois" does not match the current Domainz database. I strongly suggest that several parties involved in this understand the chronological issue here. If Domainz would like to come back to ISOCNZ council and announce that it is unable to provide a RIPE format "whois", then perhaps it would like to consider how it might like to word that submission. Others may think this looks like wilful procrastination or technical incompetence, or a sublime mixture of the two. I couldn't possibly comment. Rgds Roger De Salis (is protracted procrastination good english???) Don Stokes wrote:

Joe Abley wrote:

...

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Don Stokes wrote: Never mind changing it; what about the fact that ISOCNZ published a policy before the old "test" domainz whois server was ever available mandating the output to be consistent with RIPE-181?

Uh, how exactly is "Representation of IP Routing Policies in a Routing Registry" (http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-181.html) relevant?

I think you're thinking of RIPE-049.

The short answer is that the RIPE-049 format simply doesn't match the data held by Domainz. Your own whois demonstrates this by burying a bunch of info in the remarks: field; frankly, I wouldn't want to have anything but free-form comments in a remarks: field; as such I'd consider the RIPE format essentially unparseable for the fields that appear in the DRS format that aren't specified by RIPE-049.

Note that the offending terminology in the WHOIS policy (http://www.isocnz.org.nz/whoispolicy.html) is "... with output complying with the standard RIPE format", and doesn't actually specify a document defining exactly what is meant.

The whole point of the RIPE whois format is that it can be used as the basis of a template to be submitted to the database. Thus, when I wrote the spec for the whois (rather late in the development, with some time pressure), I, uh, creatively interpreted that policy to mean something that met the goals of the RIPE format first, met the syntactical requirements second and the precise set of fields last.

Just as RIPE-181 isn't appropriate for a RIPE format DNS registry, RIPE-049 isn't appropriate for DRS, since DRS is not a RIPE format database.

(Whether it should be is of course a completely separate argument...)

...

To be of optimal usefulness, why not code a whois server which can output in a variety of formats, including RIPE-181 and Domainz's own template format?

whois -h whois.domainz.net.nz patho.gen.nz [RIPE-181 format data]

whois -h whois.domainz.net.nz -t patho.gen.nz [Domainz template format data]

That's a possibility of course. Note that the RIPE '-t' option returns a *blank* template, so doing exactly the above would be terribly non-compilant. But there could be other ways of specifiying which format to use.

Personally though, I'd be (mildly) opposed to making RIPE-049 the default format for the reasons outlined above.

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-- \_ Roger De Salis Cisco Systems NZ Ltd