What happened to whois?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <Pine.LNX.3.95.1000208140325.8596B-100000 at mail.btechnet.com>,
Paul B. Brown <pbrown at btechnet.com> wrote:
>
>> When are they going to update the whois application for the new name or
>> have they already?
>> 
>> Who is "they"?  And why should it be updated?  whois.internic.net is
>> the central registry that all the registrars send their updates to, so
>> it's probably still the correct default.
>
>They are the maintainers of the whois or xwhois applications.

There is no single one.  Each OS vendor is on their own.  If they decide to
change the default, maybe it will happen when you install the next upgrade
to your OS.  It took some of them over 5 years before they changed their
default from nic.ddn.mil to whois.internic.net!

>It should be updated because when I run:
>
>whois btechnet.com
>
>I get limited output.  However, when I type:
>
>whois btechnet.com at whois.networksolutions.com
>
>I get the old, complete output.  What gives?

There are now lots of different registrars, not just Network Solutions.
"whois btechnet.com" tells you what whois server to go to for the details
about btechnet.com.  If the default were changed to
whois.networksolutions.com, and you tried to look up a domain that was
registered through register.com, for instance, whois would say that the
domain doesn't exist at all.

Would you really prefer that over the current behavior?

If you prefer whois.networksolutions.com, you can always write a simple
script or alias that does what you want.  I have a script of my own that
figures out whether I'm looking up a network (it determines whether it
should query ARIN, RIPE, or APNIC from the first octet) or domain.  When
I'm looking up a domain it has a table listing whois servers for many
different TLDs, and uses whois.opensrs.net for .com -- their whois server
queries whois.internic.net and then automatically queries the registrar's
server that's listed there.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
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