Re: Alternatives (was Re: whois broke again?)

[William Allen Simpson]

Rodney Joffe wrote:
> A totally new from scratch database needs to be created. And it should
> *not* be me, GeekTools, or CenterGate. Or any individual. It needs to be
> controlled by a body trusted by all. What ICANN should have and could
> have been.
> 
Trust has to start somewhere.  If you, GeekTools, or CenterGate, are 
not willing to be trustworthy, then I guess we need to find somewhere 
else.  I never expected ICANN to be a trusted entity.  It's a 
stalking horse -- by design.

How about Bill Manning at ISI?


> whois-servers.net may be more appropriate, and it is already in at least
> 2 of the BSD distributions for whois :-)
> 
I use OpenBSD, which has the modifications.  I had had high hopes 
for whois-servers.net, but it has not solved any problems.  Perhaps 
I don't understand how it works? 

It seems to require a domain to register itself in whois-servers.net 
(for example, nasa.gov.whois-servers.net) and maintain its own whois 
server.  This is pretty much a non-starter for most domains.  And it 
doesn't aggregate information to eliminate single points of failure.

What I am suggesting is a set of redundant servers, A.whois-servers.net, 
B.whois-servers.net, etc., that mirror each other's data, eliminating 
single points of failure.

While I think that Bill Manning's DNS TXT suggestion is clever, and 
nicely distributed, it requires a lot of effort.

I'm suggesting a low effort technique to collect the information that 
exists.  That is, to use the actual whois searches that are done, 
collecting the results in a new database, accessible by existing tools,
or minor modifications of tools.

Let's discuss the alternatives, and get busy.

WSimpson@UMich.edu
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