Re: FW: [tld-admin-poc] Fwd: Re: .pro whois registry down?
Joseph, Thanks for the update. However the current state of things is not good ... My Ubuntu host tries to use whois.dotproregistry.net, which has no address records. FreeBSD by default uses pro.whois-servers.net, which resolves to whois.registrypro.pro (which has an A record), but never returns with any data (arguably worse than failing immediately with an obvious error). If it were me, I would have done the following: 1. Reach out to the OS vendors and the folks at whois-servers.net with information that the proper host name for your whois service is changing. Include a drop-dead date of 3 years in the future for the old names to stop working. 2. Place a CNAME at the two (or more?) old host names so that the service will continue to work in the meantime. The CNAME costs you nothing, and while I agree that it should be able to be removed at some point in the future, having things not work at all in the short term is not the right approach. It's also not realistic to expect folks to be able to chase this down on their own ... anyone familiar with using whois on the command line has most assuredly grown accustomed to the convenience of having it "just work," as it has for the last decade or so. While people certainly *can* go back to the "good old days" of having to hunt down each registry's whois server individually, it's hard to think of that as the best approach. Is there some reason that the above can't be/hasn't been done that I'm missing? Doug On 03/09/2016 02:17 PM, Joseph Yee wrote:
Hi Doug,
Afilias had updated .PRO whois host in Jan 2016, and we filed the record to ICANN & IANA (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/pro.html).
The new host is 'whois.afilias.net <http://whois.afilias.net>' and not 'whois.dotproregistry.net <http://whois.dotproregistry.net>' anymore.
Some operating systems may not update their whois configuration yet. You may need to check and update the configuration manually for PRO WHOIS server before official patch were available.
Best Regards, Joseph Yee Afilias
On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 4:56 PM, Michael Flanagan <mflanagan@afilias.info <mailto:mflanagan@afilias.info>> wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Barton [mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us <mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us>] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2016 4:54 PM To: tld-admin-poc@afilias.info <mailto:tld-admin-poc@afilias.info>; tld-tech-poc@afilias.info <mailto:tld-tech-poc@afilias.info> Subject: [tld-admin-poc] Fwd: Re: .pro whois registry down?
FYI
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: .pro whois registry down? Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2016 13:51:28 -0800 From: Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us <mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us>> To: Bryan Holloway <bholloway@pavlovmedia.com <mailto:bholloway@pavlovmedia.com>>, NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org <mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
On 03/09/2016 01:24 PM, Bryan Holloway wrote: > Anyone else noticing that the .pro TLD is failing for some things, and > their WHOIS registry appears to be unavailable?
The delegation from the root to PRO, and the PRO name servers themselves, seem to be working.
> I appear to be able to resolve, but whois times out, and we're getting > reports that mail isn't going through for some folks with this TLD.
The address records for whois.dotproregistry.net <http://whois.dotproregistry.net> are missing.
Doug
Additionally 'whois' is free form text. Whois doesn't include a AI to workout what this free form text means so, no, there isn't a actual referral for a whois application to use. Additionally we should be publishing where the whois server for the tld is in the DNS. whois applications could be looking for this then falling back to other methods. e.g. _whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net. If we want machines to follow referrals we have to provide them in appropriate forms. Mark In message <56E0BFD4.7020403@dougbarton.us>, Doug Barton writes:
Joseph,
Thanks for the update. However the current state of things is not good ... My Ubuntu host tries to use whois.dotproregistry.net, which has no address records. FreeBSD by default uses pro.whois-servers.net, which resolves to whois.registrypro.pro (which has an A record), but never returns with any data (arguably worse than failing immediately with an obvious error).
If it were me, I would have done the following:
1. Reach out to the OS vendors and the folks at whois-servers.net with information that the proper host name for your whois service is changing. Include a drop-dead date of 3 years in the future for the old names to stop working.
2. Place a CNAME at the two (or more?) old host names so that the service will continue to work in the meantime.
The CNAME costs you nothing, and while I agree that it should be able to be removed at some point in the future, having things not work at all in the short term is not the right approach.
It's also not realistic to expect folks to be able to chase this down on their own ... anyone familiar with using whois on the command line has most assuredly grown accustomed to the convenience of having it "just work," as it has for the last decade or so. While people certainly *can* go back to the "good old days" of having to hunt down each registry's whois server individually, it's hard to think of that as the best approach.
Is there some reason that the above can't be/hasn't been done that I'm missing?
Doug
On 03/09/2016 02:17 PM, Joseph Yee wrote:
Hi Doug,
Afilias had updated .PRO whois host in Jan 2016, and we filed the record to ICANN & IANA (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/pro.html).
The new host is 'whois.afilias.net <http://whois.afilias.net>' and not 'whois.dotproregistry.net <http://whois.dotproregistry.net>' anymore.
Some operating systems may not update their whois configuration yet. You may need to check and update the configuration manually for PRO WHOIS server before official patch were available.
Best Regards, Joseph Yee Afilias
On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 4:56 PM, Michael Flanagan <mflanagan@afilias.info <mailto:mflanagan@afilias.info>> wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Barton [mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us <mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us>] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2016 4:54 PM To: tld-admin-poc@afilias.info <mailto:tld-admin-poc@afilias.info>; tld-tech-poc@afilias.info <mailto:tld-tech-poc@afilias.info> Subject: [tld-admin-poc] Fwd: Re: .pro whois registry down?
FYI
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: .pro whois registry down? Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2016 13:51:28 -0800 From: Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us <mailto:dougb@dougbarton.us>> To: Bryan Holloway <bholloway@pavlovmedia.com <mailto:bholloway@pavlovmedia.com>>, NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org <mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
On 03/09/2016 01:24 PM, Bryan Holloway wrote: > Anyone else noticing that the .pro TLD is failing for some things, and > their WHOIS registry appears to be unavailable?
The delegation from the root to PRO, and the PRO name servers themselves, seem to be working.
> I appear to be able to resolve, but whois times out, and we're getting > reports that mail isn't going through for some folks with this TLD.
The address records for whois.dotproregistry.net <http://whois.dotproregistry.net> are missing.
Doug
-- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 3:54 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
Additionally 'whois' is free form text. Whois doesn't include a AI to workout what this free form text means so, no, there isn't a actual referral for a whois application to use.
I'm not affiliated, but there are a couple of companies that normalize whois data. It's a whackamole game, but it sucks less than trying to do it yourself.
Additionally we should be publishing where the whois server for the tld is in the DNS. whois applications could be looking for this then falling back to other methods.
e.g.
_whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net.
If we want machines to follow referrals we have to provide them in appropriate forms.
That's a great idea. Royce
Worst comes to worst there's a python based whois client called pwhois that lets you dump whois data into json --srs
On 10-Mar-2016, at 6:50 AM, Royce Williams <royce@techsolvency.com> wrote:
I'm not affiliated, but there are a couple of companies that normalize whois data. It's a whackamole game, but it sucks less than trying to do it yourself.
On 03/09/2016 04:54 PM, Mark Andrews wrote:
Additionally we should be publishing where the whois server for the tld is in the DNS. whois applications could be looking for this then falling back to other methods.
e.g.
_whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net.
If we want machines to follow referrals we have to provide them in appropriate forms.
Brilliant, wish I'd thought of it :) Doug
Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
Additionally 'whois' is free form text. Whois doesn't include a AI to workout what this free form text means so, no, there isn't a actual referral for a whois application to use.
Yes, the whois data format is bullshit, but there are only a few simple referral patterns in use, so in practice following referrals works OK.
Additionally we should be publishing where the whois server for the tld is in the DNS.
_whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net.
That would be nice, but in practice the requirement is a whois.nic.TLD host rather than a SRV record. And we don't really need yet another way to find whois servers - we already have more than enough. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ Humber, Thames: East or southeast 3 or 4. Slight. Mainly fair. Moderate or good.
_whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net.
A swell idea, but unfortunately the idea of putting SRV records in gTLD zones makes heads at ICANN explode. For RDAP there's a registry at IANA but it's not populated yet and it's not obvious that registries will be any more diligent about updating it than they are for the WHOIS entries in the TLD database.
If we want machines to follow referrals we have to provide them in appropriate forms.
<domain.whois-servers.net is OK but not updated very often. I've set up <domain>.ws.sp.am (that's ws for Whois Server) which is updated every day from a variety of sources so it's pretty accurate. It's had the right server for pro.ws.sp.am all along. R's, John
On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:32 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
_whois._tcp.pro. srv 0 100 43 whois.afilias.net.
A swell idea, but unfortunately the idea of putting SRV records in gTLD zones makes heads at ICANN explode. For RDAP there's a registry at IANA but it's not populated yet and it's not obvious that registries will be any more diligent about updating it than they are for the WHOIS entries in the TLD database.
If we want machines to follow referrals we have to provide them in appropriate forms.
<domain.whois-servers.net is OK but not updated very often.
I've set up <domain>.ws.sp.am (that's ws for Whois Server) which is updated every day from a variety of sources so it's pretty accurate. It's had the right server for pro.ws.sp.am all along.
Hey, that's fantastic! Feature request: could you provide a human- and machine-readable one-stop extract at the top-level page (ws.sp.am) ? Royce
I've set up <domain>.ws.sp.am (that's ws for Whois Server) which is updated every day from a variety of sources so it's pretty accurate. It's had the right server for pro.ws.sp.am all along.
Hey, that's fantastic!
Feature request: could you provide a human- and machine-readable one-stop extract at the top-level page (ws.sp.am) ?
I can make a web page, but not sure what you mean by one-stop extract. If you mean a proxy that will do the whois lookups, no, because it'd get abused and I'd get rate limited. R's, John
On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:57 AM, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I've set up <domain>.ws.sp.am (that's ws for Whois Server) which is updated every day from a variety of sources so it's pretty accurate. It's had the right server for pro.ws.sp.am all along.
Hey, that's fantastic!
Feature request: could you provide a human- and machine-readable one-stop extract at the top-level page (ws.sp.am) ?
I can make a web page, but not sure what you mean by one-stop extract. If you mean a proxy that will do the whois lookups, no, because it'd get abused and I'd get rate limited.
Definitely not a proxy request - I know exactly what that would mean. The goal would be to provide a unified list of the servers for each TLD, to help people who cannot change their whois client for administrative/political/inertia reasons, but have control over their whois.conf, a la: https://superuser.com/questions/758647/how-to-whois-new-tlds So in an ideal world: - a top-level landing page that would explain briefly what it's for, and - a link from that top-level page to the whole list, in regex-aware, whois.conf-compatible format Royce
- a link from that top-level page to the whole list, in regex-aware, whois.conf-compatible format
What uses whois.conf? Not the whois on my FreeBSD or Mac. Or you can just use this shell script: #!/bin/bash WHOISHOST=${1##*.}.ws.sp.am exec whois -h $WHOISHOST $* R's, John
Hai!
whois.conf-compatible format
What uses whois.conf? Not the whois on my FreeBSD or Mac.
Or you can just use this shell script:
#!/bin/bash WHOISHOST=${1##*.}.ws.sp.am exec whois -h $WHOISHOST $*
I just a slightly different one but still my fav one... jwhois Has a whois.conf style list. Bye, Raymond.
John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I've set up <domain>.ws.sp.am (that's ws for Whois Server) which is updated every day from a variety of sources so it's pretty accurate. It's had the right server for pro.ws.sp.am all along.
It would be extra super helpful if every entry were a wildcard, so you could look up (say) example.com.ws.sp.am and get a CNAME for the right whois server. The reason for this is that the relevant whois server is not always keyed off just the TLD, and sometimes the TLD doesn't provide a referral. A particular case I know of is ac.uk vs. uk. You could have *.uk.ws.sp.am. CNAME whois.nic.uk. *.ac.uk.ws.sp.am. CNAME whois.ja.net. Then I could look up cambridge.ac.uk.ws.sp.am and cambridge.net.uk.ws.sp.am and get the right pointer in each case with a single DNS lookup. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ Southeast Fitzroy: Northerly 5 or 6, becoming variable 4 in north and west. Rough becoming moderate later. Mainly fair. Good.
participants (8)
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Doug Barton -
John Levine -
John R. Levine
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Mark Andrews -
Raymond Dijkxhoorn -
Royce Williams -
Suresh Ramasubramanian -
Tony Finch