What happened to whois?

[Paul B. Brown]

> 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!

Good God!  Your kidding?  5 years!  I guess I can get the source and do
the mods myself.

> 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?

I didn't this.  I see your point.  Thanks for the explanation.

> 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.

Got it.  Thanks!

Paul