Re: IETF-51 WhoisFix BoF Announcement

> >look to rfc 1580 for historical guidance....
>
> RFC 1580 is an interesting, historical and informational document.

Agreed.

> It also doesn't accurately reflect the way that Whois is being used
> by very many (if any) people today.

Disagree - I, for one, use it very much as described in 1580 on a regular
basis...

> If our goal is to try and take a
> look at what is currently going on over port 43, RFC 1580 is not
> going to be very descriptive of the status quo.

>From 1580...
   "WHOIS provides directory service to network users. This service is a
   way of finding e-mail addresses, postal addresses and telephone
   numbers. It may also deliver information about networks, networking
   organizations, domains and sites."

   "In its current implementation, WHOIS has some limitations which
   prevent it from becoming an efficient directory service for a large
   volume of information and numerous requests: the various WHOIS
   servers have no knowledge of each other, a database is maintained at
   each server site, and, finally, new functionalities have been
   implemented locally at various sites and not propagated."

  "WHOIS is available to users on the international TCP/IP network (the
   Internet).

   A WHOIS server is accessible across the network from a user program
   running on local machines or via an interactive Telnet session to the
   site which hosts the server."

   "In general, WHOIS servers should only be used for isolated queries
   about specific information. Typically, it is not acceptable to make
   an extended series of queries to obtain large sections of the
   directory.  Such a strategy is unfair both because of excessive
   consumption of server resources, and because the directory
   information belongs to individuals. In particular, extracting lists
   of people for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited."

Sections 6.4.1, 6.4.2 and 6.5 also provide some great cues for new
implementations....

It sounds pretty descriptive of a number of status quo's to me...




>
> As long as the structure imposed on port 43 queries is made in a way
> that doesn't prevent unstructured queries from functioning as they do
> now (which probably just means that new clients still need to be able
> to deal with unstructured results somehow, probably just by dumping
> them to the screen as occurs now), the existence of other types of
> queries becomes not very important.  Those other uses will simply
> continued unaffected.
>

To rephrase your last sentence..."We must make sure that other uses will
continue unaffected."

-rwr