It has to be separate from SWIP though, as rwhois servers don't issue SWIP.

This is basically where I started thinking about LDAP. If rwhois doesn't do the job, then we could either fix/enhance rwhois or move to something else. Anyone who has ever delved into the internals of rwhoisd knows what kind of quick hackery it is, therefore moving to something else is the only realistic option. LDAP is designed for read-mostly databases therefore it does support updating the database as long as the frequency of updates is low. So it is entirely practical for LDAP to be used as a replacement for SWIP, i.e. sending update transactions to an aggregating database. If you want to try some of this, the open source server from http://www.openldap.org is the place to start. But please consider developing tools in Java/jython or Python or Ruby rather than Perl. This makes it a lot easier for other people to re-use, improve and contribute http://www.jython.org/ http://python-ldap.sourceforge.net/ http://ruby-ldap.sourceforge.net/ --Michael Dillon