NSI Bulletin 098-010 | Update on Whois

Wed Sep 9 21:29:54 UTC 1998

In article <Pine.BSD/.3.91.980909153738.7931A at crispy.iconn.net> you write:
>According to David Holtzman of NSI (i asked him), the restrictions on whois 
>are merely for technical reasons.  I believe that he believes this, and 
>from his point of view they have every right to filter/limit obnoxious or 
>badly configured hosts/sites.

	I have a call to arms.  If we could get orginizations to 
mirror the whois data, and provide full, public access to it
(via the current whois database) we could remove some of the 
dependency on NSI.  After all, they don't run the only root, lots
of other people run them as well...why should they run the only
whois server?

	If we could get some geograpically distributed and have
a whois-servers.net like root-servers.net to find them all that
would be highly useful.  It would distribute the load and make
whois more reliable since there would be multiple servers.  The
mirrors could also develop advanced interfaces on their own
(web/e-mail, better searching, whatever) as value adds.  I'd 
even support fees for the value adds as long as the basic "whois"
method remained free.

	Thoughts?

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bicknell at dimension.net
Network Engineer (CCIE #3440) - Dimension Enterprises
1-703-709-7500, fax, 1-703-709-7699