I thought this might be of interest: The whois for .us had been working a few weeks ago, but hadn't been since then. I dropped an email to action@isi.edu (who had been hosting the whois server until a few weeks ago) and cc'd usdomreg@nic.us and got the following responses: Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 12:21:22 -0700 From: IPC Computing Services <action@ISI.EDU> To: James Smallacombe <james@pil.net> Cc: action@ISI.EDU, action-team@ISI.EDU Subject: Re: {2001.08.445} .us TLD whois not in DNS
http://www.nic.us/register/whois.html
Instructs one to use whois.isi.edu
for whois queries on the .us TLD. It's not in DNS:
[richard namedb james]$ traceroute whois.isi.edu traceroute: unknown host whois.isi.edu
Could you please look into this and let me know if either the website is wrong or this will be fixed?
At the request of the US Department of Commerce, USC/ISI transitioned all support for the US Domain to Verisign at the end of 2000. We appologize that the Verisign supported web site still points to USC/ISI resources but we have no control over their publication of data. IPC Computing Services ------- 31 hours later from the new registrar (Verisign): Date: Thu, 09 Aug 2001 19:27:10 -0400 From: US domreg <usdomreg@nic.us> To: James Smallacombe <james@pil.net> Cc: usreply@nic.us Subject: Re: .us TLD whois not in DNS Dear James, Thank you for contacting the US Domain Registry. The whois database was run by ISI until recently. The whois server has now been taken offline and so there is no .us whois server currently. We are currently working on a replacement but there is no estimate on how long that will take. In the meantime, if there are specific domains you wish to have information on, please email them to us and we will manually find the information for you. Regards, US Domain Registry www.nic.us usdomreg@nic.us =============================================================================== ok, so .us isn't very widely used, but why then, did the DOC give it to Verisign? James Smallacombe PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor up@3.am http://3.am =========================================================================