Joe Abley
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. -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog