Have you been by http://www.rwhois.net/rwhois/ or the rwhois@rwhois.net mailing list?

There exist a few different clients and servers. The current/draft spec is at http://www.rwhois.net/rwhois/rwhois1.5/rwhois-1.5.txt, if I recall correctly.

Yes, I have been there. I have also talked with some people at the Internic. My words come from experience, not what is written there. For instance, root.rwhois.net actually has two A records, presumably two machines that perform the same function. For the week that I looked at it one responded with "connection refused" for the entire time. So, maybe they have multiple servers, but there's none us mere mortals (who get their info from DNS) can use. Another example, "-forward on" has not been implemented in the rwhois server that they distribute. And finally, to make my point that what is there is not useful, I point to my web query engine. Check out my script, http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/rwhois.cgi (change .cgi to .txt to get the code). I don't profess it's a "cool product" or fully developed, or anything like that. It's about 4 hours of hacking that frankly in both formatting and usefulness blow away the "web query" engine on http://www.rwhois.net/rwhois/products/web/index.html. Use my script to query a network address. It's the data from before ARIN split off, still being served up as authortative. It's plain wrong, and has generated a lot of questions. Please don't get the impression I think it's garbage, it's actually quite close to being useful. At the same time for all the info I want to get out of the database my experiment has proved that it is at best, no better than whois. In fact, whois returns more nameservers to a server query than any of the Internic servers. I'd run my own server, but the one on the ftp site (1.5.2) doesn't compile on FreeBSD out of the box. (Ok, I fixed it in 10 seconds, but I still couldn't understand from the docs how to make it answer/cache any useful query, I gave up). If ISP's are going to use this it has to be simple to set up, and provide a quality of service that is _better_ than whois. Until that happens, no one will be interested in it, plain and simple. I do hope I can spark some discussion/movement on this. I'm sure there are more people close to it who can make rwhois do a lot of great stuff. If they can just help push it to a wider deployment, and add a few more fetures that users want, it will be there. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@dimension.net Network Engineer (CCIE #3440) - Dimension Enterprises 1-703-709-7500, fax, 1-703-709-7699