As far as I know, the rwhois interface is more oriented toward the approach that you propose. You can walk the rwhois protocol thru a query or two via a simple telnet interface. The network of rwhois servers transfer complete zones. I think the original idea was to make it more like the DNS, only with contact information. Here
I hadn't looked at rwhois in a long time, so I went ahead and reread some things on it. It is close, but I believe it is missing some key data. For instance, I could not get any phone numbers for any of our domains or contacts, information readily available via whois. Phone numbers are one of the very useful things whois provides when you have immediate problems with far-off networks. I did hack up a nice perl client to connect to the server and return information in the exact same format as "whois", which is kinda cool, and I also hacked up a nice web page interface that makes everything links and all that. Functionalty wise I think it's much better than the one on the rwhois page. See http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/rwhois.cgi if you want to try it for yourself. (NB: I seem to be getting "connection refused" far too frequently tonight, which for now results in a blank page...I have no idea why right now.) If someone can tell me how to get phone numbers in I'll post a URL to the script itself, so you can have your own "whois" client that uses "rwhois". If they are completely unavailable I go back to stating a need to replicate the whois data, perhaps into a "rwhois" database. :-) -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@dimension.net Network Engineer (CCIE #3440) - Dimension Enterprises 1-703-709-7500, fax, 1-703-709-7699