Hi Scott and I have been working on trying to solve the whois problem involving the network entites that we register and delegate to others. Our data is heirarchical in nature and can be easily "referred" to other sites for the particular record or additional information. We have created a referral server and client (aka RWhois) to show this concept and to get your comments on whether we should continue carrying on with this idea. An alpha release of the RWhois client and server is available via anonymous ftp from rs.internic.net as /pub/rwhois/rwhois-B0.1.tar.Z. It contains the source for the rwhois server; the rwhois client; a partial, edited copy of the freeWAIS-0.1 distribution; and an example data directory that you can bring up the rwhois server quickly. Both the client and server are in the Alpha stages and things will be changing as we continue to develop this idea (some are listed below). If you are interested and/or want to get announcements for the latest and greatest versions, please join the rwhois@internic.net mailing list. To join, send a request to: rwhois-request@internic.net. If you experience any bugs, send a note to the RWhois development team: rwhois-bugs@internic.net Things that will be added/changed in releases in the very near future: Additional client-to-server commands: - soa (gives soa and update information and where to send templates) - badref (bad reference) - recurref (recursive reference found) - holdconnect (hold connection for interactive queries) Additional client options: - use of client-to-server commands - better handling of server-to-client commands Configuration details: - Currently the configuration defaults to slam.internic.net port 3636 on your particular queries. THIS WILL CHANGE to rs.internic.net port 4343 with the full-blown database (I want my IPC back!). - The data is a SUBSET of the actual whois data. Do a -xfer to see what data is in each RWhois server to test (a set is also in the RWhois draft rs.internic.net:/pub/rwhois/draft-rwhois-00.txt.) - To see examples of how RWhois works, look at the EXAMPLES file (rs.internic.net:/pub/rwhois/EXAMPLES. Addititional Documentation Coming: - RWhois protocol specification - RWhois client documentation - RWhois server documentation Also in the archive, we have a set of examples along with explanations of what is happening in /pub/rwhois/EXAMPLES. We hope you will examine and experiment with RWhois. Please send your comments to rwhois@internic.net. We would like to hear from you! Thanks for your time, Mark