RFC 1834 (rfc1834) - Page 2 of 7

Whois and Network Information Lookup Service, Whois++

RFC 1834                 Whois++ Lookup Service              August 1995


   restriction.

   This paper acknowledges the existence of many distributed information
   servers, and anticipates the creation of many more. To help users
   locate WHOIS servers, each server should have a nameserver entry in
   the form "whois.domain", i.e. whois.internic.net.

III.  Client Design and Behavior

   The client provides the user interface to the WHOIS system and a
   mechanism for query generation and display of the response.  The
   client is responsible for providing support for paging of long output
   from the server.  All clients must provide this service.  The server
   will not include any special characters, or make any efforts to
   control output to a screen.

   Special search criteria may be specified by the use of keywords or
   special characters, some of which are defined in RFC 954.  Clients
   should be designed to make support for quoted strings unnecessary.

IV.  Server Design and Behavior

   The server should return the same information in response to a given
   query consistently, regardless of the client software or the hardware
   used to originate the query. Queries should be evaluated on a case-
   insensitive basis. Spaces should not be considered in searches.  A
   search for "La Russo" should return both "LaRusso" and "La Russo" as
   matches.

   There are three types of data records supported in this proposal:
   records for people, hosts, and domains.

   Individual records

   Name                    Name of the individual          required

   Organization            Name of the organization        required

   Organization-type       Type of organization            optional
                           (university, commercial research)

   Work-telephone          Work telephone number           optional

   Fax-telephone           Fax telephone number            optional

   Work-address            Work postal address             optional





Gargano & Weiss              Informational