nick wrote:
In response to the question raised by Andy.
The quote "Working as intended" in this instance means that the .nz whois service is available for legitimate public access enquiries. As noted in an earlier post and again by Tim, when the whois service is underload , requests may be restricted or dropped and under extreme situations the service may be closed down (this would be outside of working as intended).
Is there a document which describes what is meant by underload? It would be useful for those in the NZNOG community to understand the parameters of this service so they can set their expectations.
The whois service will continue to operate and queries can be undertaken via the DNC website www.dnc.org.nz or one of the .nz authorised registrars (full list available on the DNC website).
Why are queries from the general public seen as some kind of second class query with registrars getting preference?
What appears to have added to the confusion is that Domainz operate 2 whois services on their website, one public and the other as part of their domain registration process. The public service was restricted for periods yesterday and this occurs from time to time.
From the above it seems that that if the load increases above some threshold
So what happens in this restricted access mode to old fashioned industry standard whois on port 43 i.e the actual whois service as defined in RFC3912 (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3912.txt)? Some of us luddites are still not committed 100% to doing everything via the web. Does this service become unavailable in the "restricted state"? The APNIC and RIPE servers curtail access based on the offending IP address. then all public access is closed off until the load drops.