whoisd(8)

NAME
whoisd - perl based whois daemon for RIPE like databases

SYNOPSIS

whoisd [ -d ]

DESCRIPTION

whoisd is Internet daemon that will listen to the whois port as defined in /etc/services(5), default port 43. It will listen for queries, fork of a child process that will process the query and die. It uses a configuration file (see dbconfig(5)) for database definition, various verbose messages and logfiles.

All queries processed by whoisd will be logged in logfile specified in the configuration file.

whoisd must be run as root, because it will try and listen by default to port 43, a privileged port. Do not run whoisd from inetd(8) because reading the configuration file every time it is started will take too long. whoisd will detach itself from the terminal and run as a daemon.

OPTIONS
whoisd takes one command line argument:

-d  run in debug mode. When run in debug mode, whoisd will not detach itself from the current terminal, and will output debug information. It will listen and answers queries as normal, and display what it is doing on the terminal it was started on.

If any other command line arguments are passed, whoisd behaves like a whois client. If you specify: whoisd marten it will try and lookup key "marten" in the databases it serves and exit. It will not continue to run as a daemon. This is useful for quick testing of lookups without having to start a real whoisd. It is however slow to use it as a real whois client, because it needs to read the configuration file everytime it is called.

ENVIRONMENT

The configuration file whoisd and all the other RIPE database software uses can be hardcoded in at installation time (usually default config) or set in environment variable RIPEDBCNF

SEE ALSO
dbm(3X) netdbm(8) dbconfig(5)

BUGS

Not that I know of.

AUTHOR

Marten Terpstra, RIPE Network Coordination Centre <marten@ripe.net>