One document matched: draft-faltstrom-whois-01.txt
Differences from draft-faltstrom-whois-00.txt
Network Working Group P Faltstrom
Internet-Draft Tele2
Expires: March 9, 2000 M Kosters
Network Solutions
September 9, 1999
Referal extension to the Whois protocol
draft-faltstrom-whois-01.txt
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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This Internet-Draft will expire on March 9, 2000.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document presents extensions to the Whois protocol output
format which enables a possibility for the server to send referal
information to the Whois client. This referal mechanism can be used
for example in a situation with a registrar/registry model, where
the registrars all have their own Whois databases, and together they
serve a whole TLD. It can also be used when implementing a
root-whois service on top of all whois servers in the world, and
this way enable the possibility of creating advanced proxy services.
For the latter, a registration procedure is also suggested, where
Whois services can be registered.
Discussion on this Internet-Draft is to be held on the mailing list
ietf-whois-ext@imc.org, which is hosted by the Internet Mail
Consortium. To subscribe, send an email to
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ietf-whois-ext-request@imc.org, with the text "subscribe" as the
only word in the body of the mail. There is an archive of the
mailing list at <http://www.imc.org/ietf-whois-ext/>.
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1. Introduction
The whois service[1] as it used today is a pure client-server
protocol. There is no means for a client to know what server to
query, and no way a server can give back information to a client
about other matches at other Whois servers. I.e. there is no way one
can with the Whois protocol build distributed Whois services.
Several attempts have been made, like Whois++ and RWhois, but the
most successful ones have been Whois services which in turn act as
proxies, so the client uses the same old Whois protocol, and the
server hide the fact that the query from the client is fan out to
more than one server in turn.
This document is a try to define extensions to the Whois protocol
which makes it easier to develop such proxy services.
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2. Background
There is an operational need on the Internet to get to know the
technical contact for a certain domainname or IP-address. Today,
this information is stored in Whois servers, and the clients used
are using the Whois protocol to get the data.
The whois servers are run by entities responsible for a domain, a
block of IP addresses or such. To be able to get information, the
client need to know which Whois service do have information about
the record queried for.
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3. IANA
IANA is responsible for handling out IP-addresses and domainnames in
the world. This responsibility is delegated to, regarding
domainnames, registries for TLDs, and for IP-addresses the regional
registres that exists in the world.
Each one of these registries can in turn have delegated the
responsibility for delegation, and in some cases this has also
implied delegation of responsibility of running a Whois service for
that delegated part of the address space, and in some cases not.
Especially when a registry in turn have registrars doing
registrations and delegations on behalf of the registry, the issue
with Whois service for the information becomes complicated.
Because of these increased complicated structures of the Whois
services in the world, this document suggests some structure to the
Whois protocol which makes it possible for IANA and others to
implement proxy services on top of all the Whois servers that exist,
and will exist in the future.
It is extremely important that backward compatibility is kept for
whois clients, i.e. we talk in this paper about the protocol between
the server holding the information and the proxy, not between the
proxy and the Whois client.
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4. Format
4.1 Version
Any server using any of these extensions MUST have a line which is
the first in the Whois output which reads:
% VERSION 1
The version number 1 is expected to change when future versions of
this document are released.
4.2 Character set
The basic protocol is US-ASCII only. We suggest that a whois service
can announce the character set used by using the specific line in
the Whois output:
% CHARSET UTF-8
(UTF-8 in the example above is just an example)
Any character set registered by IANA can be used. Software which is
compliant with this extension MUST be able to handle the character
set UTF-8.
It should be noted that this is an extension to the Whois protocol,
which is 7-bit only.
The CHARSET statement MUST be present in the whois output before any
use of the charset itself.
A CHARSET statement MUST NOT be used more than once in each whois
response.
4.3 Referral
A Whois service can announce a referral by using the specific line
in the Whois output:
% ALSO WHOIS://WHOIS.EXAMPLE.NET/FOO
The string after "ALSO" is just an example of a WHOIS URI.
A Whois URI is defined by:
whoisurl = "whois://" hostport [ "/" whoissrch ]
where
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whoissrch = *uchar
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5. Usage of these extensions
5.1 Proxy deployment
It is expected that any organization can produce a Whois proxy which
understands these extensions. The proxy can using this information
both convert character sets and act as a proxy (query more than one
server) without the Whois client knowing that the service didn't
have the data locally.
The proxy service is expected to get initial referral information
(i.e. a list of Whois servers to query) from a central repository,
IANA.
5.2 Initial feed of referral information
IANA is presumed to in the contract with TLD and IP-address
registries include enough information so that the registry inform
IANA on where the Whois service is located (hostname/portnumber).
IANA should publish a list of available Whois servers on it's
ftp-site, so any whois proxy service can fetch the latest
information at it's will.
The format of this list is a list of Whois URIs, together with
information on what data the service is authoritative for, using
star (*) as wildcard for domainnames, and CIDR notation for
IP-addresses. Semi-colon is the separator between the fields.
Examples:
dns;*\.se;whois://whois.nic-se.se
ipv4;192.71.0.0/16;whois://whois.ripe.net
More attributes can be added in the future by adding columns to this
list. A client MUST accept any number of columns, while only parsing
the ones which it is interested in.
5.3 DNS type information
Whois servers which can take Domainnames as input to queries are
marked with the token dns in field number one. The second field
consists of a regular expression marking what domainnames exists on
this perticular server. The third field is a Whois URI specifying
where the service is located.
5.4 IPv4 information
Whois servers which can take IPv4 addresses as input to queries are
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marked with the token ipv4 in field number one. The second field
consists of an ipv4 network specification in dotted decimal format,
with network length specification, of what IPv4 addresses that
exists on this perticular server. The third field is a Whois URI
specifying where the service is located.
5.5 Output from proxy service to whois client
A proxy service SHOULD give information on the hostname (for example
via a URI to the original object) to the Whois service where the
record originated from. This so a human parsing the output from the
Whois client can reissue the query to this originating Whois service
to get more information if he so wishes.
5.6 Registry
A Registry Whois service holds from the proxy perspective
information about names which is delegated from IANA. The Whois
server can be implemented either as a Whois Proxy service, a Whois
server or a Whois referral server as described in this paper.
Changes on the whois server, for example move of the service from
one IP-address to another, have to be reported by the registry to
IANA, which updates the list of Whois servers.
5.7 Registrar, second level Whois service
The second level service can in turn either be a Whois service, a
referral server too, or a whois proxy service. It can also be the
case that the Registry run the whois service for the whole from IANA
delegated block of addresses, and the Registrar reporting changes to
the Registry.
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References
[1] Harrenstien, K, Stahl, M and E Feinler, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC
954, October 1998.
Authors' Addresses
Patrik Faltstrom
Tele2
Borgarfjordsgatan 16
127 61 Kista
Sweden
EMail: paf@swip.net
URI: http://www.tele2.se
Mark Kosters
Network Solutions
Herndon
USA
EMail: markk@internic.net
URI: http://www.networksolutions.com
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Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
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Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
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