Re: NZ whois server

On Wed, 31 May 2000, 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?

4. The Routing Registry and the RIPE Database One of the activities of RIPE is to maintain a database of Euro- pean IP networks, DNS domains and their contact persons along with various other kinds of network management information. The database content is public and can be queried using the whois protocol as well as retrieved as a whole. This supports NICs/NOCs all over Europe and beyond to perform their respective tasks. The RIPE database combines both allocation registry and routing registry functions. The RIPE allocation registry contains data about address space allocated to specific enterprises and/or delegated to local registries as well as data about the domain name space. The allocation registry is described in separate documents [6,7] and outside the scope of this document. One of the points made at the time that John was asking for feedback on the draft policy was that the whois server should be capable of supporting a route registry for NZ operators as well as a respository for domain names, which perhaps helps to explain where 181 came from. Of course the idea of entrusting Domainz with routing policy now is rediculous, but at the time UoW was providing a good sanity layer between management idiocy and the network and this didn't seem like such a silly idea.

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.

The long answer is that to be useful, an automated interface should return data which is easy to parse. Since there are many RIPE-181-format whois servers in the world, and a correspondingly large number of existing clients (user-driven and machine-driven), it makes sense to use the convenient format.

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.

But the conclusion that it refers to a whois server returning data in the same manner as whois.ripe.net is hardly difficult to reach.

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.

Is that an apology, Don? :)

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.

You seem to have missed the point. The vast majority of the hits I get on the RIPE-alike whois server running on maggie.automagic.org are from outside the country, and I would bet very few of them are concerned with registering a domain (they're more likely looking up e-mail addresses to complain about network abuse). Returning a template suitable for resubmission is pointless. Returning a result in a format that is different to every other whois server on the planet is just unhelpful.

...

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.

That's right! Non-compliance is bad!

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

With respect, your personal views don't count for much. John polled the community at the time he wrote the ISOCNZ policy document, and the consensus was that a RIPE-format whois server was what was required. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog