whois server features

shawn wilson ag4ve.us at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 20:18:07 UTC 2015


On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
>>> So, you’re not running into a poorly-documented mystery, you’ve run afoul of one of the rotten armpits of the shub-Internet.
>>>
>> So there's no consensus between NICs for the information they should
>> have in whois and what search mechanisms they should provide? I guess
>> what you're saying is that whois is just a protocol definition and
>> nothing else?
>
> Correct.  It gets you a blob of text.  Sometimes, a blob is just a blob.  Other times, it contains what _appear_ to be key-value pairs, but are instead loosely-formatted text.  Other times, it contains textually-represented key-value pairs that are programmatically generated from an actual database, and can thus be re-imported into another database.  Depends what’s on the back end.
>

This is not the response I was looking for (and reading the RFC makes
me feel even worse).

Is there a better mechanism for querying NICs for host/owner information?



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