RFC 1834 (rfc1834) - Page 2 of 7
Whois and Network Information Lookup Service, Whois++
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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