Subject: "WHOIS Searches" changed on root servers (1/Phone Books)
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 93 19:41:06 EDT

Last week, Mark McCahill updated 1/Phone Books on the root Gopher
servers (gopher{,2}.tc.umn.edu) so that the WHOIS Searches item is a
directory here at MIT (sipb.mit.edu, port 70) with the selector
B:Internet whois servers.

At sipb.mit.edu, we've had a list of servers available via anonymous
FTP since January 1992 (it's in pub/whois/whois-servers.list). Our
Gopher server has search items for all the servers on this list, and
will track list updates (there've been 67 updates in the past year).

In most cases, our Gopher server will result in clients contacting the
whois-server host itself, on port 43 (i.e., whatever the client
queries for becomes a "document" on that host). This means clients
shouldn't be expecting a Lastline (trailing dot).

Other stuff we have:

 -- server verification. We regularly poll all the whois servers from
here, send them queries that have worked in the past, and see if they
are still providing whois responses. If not (and it persists for a
month or so), this is followed up with mail to postmaster asking if
the server is discontinued and should be removed from the list. Also,
rather than entirely removing a server, we can special-case it so that
the whois query is done from sipb.mit.edu, rather than from the Gopher
client. The special-case servers are typically ones that have unusual
or intermittent whois implementations, e.g., ones that don't close the
connection after responding (or after not responding...).

 -- server discovery. We (less regularly) send out whois queries to
hundreds of Internet hosts that we think might be running a whois
server, based on various heuristics related to the host name, other
network services it provides, etc. This is the primary method for
getting new entries for the server list, although occasionally someone
sends me mail about a new one. In any case, the server postmaster is
contacted before we announce his service through Gopher; currently I
have a separate listing of 21 servers that don't want to be announced
(a listing, sadly, not available via Gopher here. Sorry!).

 -- whois information. We have a few Gopher documents about
use/purpose of whois, and some describing which servers have non-local
coverage. The largest one is the file we've traditionally had
available via FTP; you can get it (preferably) via the selector
G:original whois list file.

 -- limited logging. We're logging the peer IP address for all
connections, and the item type requested. We're intentionally not
logging the search strings (i.e., the names looked up on a whois
server), or even which servers a client contacts.

 -- inexplicable downtime. (What, you thought this was a feature
list?) The sipb.mit.edu hardware is a bit new and we've occasionally
needed to take the machine down for ... "performance tuning". This
should clear up within a week or so (?). Also, we run several other
services on this machine, currently including [email-masked]
and a local (MIT) conferencing system, so we tend not to leave it
halted for gratuitously long periods.

Matt