Draft on using SRV records to locate whois servers

James,

thanks for your feedback.

> Without SRV records, if I wish to use whois to talk to a server named
> whois.isp.net I should lookup the A record of whois.isp.net and
> contact that host.
>
> With SRV I should lookup the SRV of _whois._tcp.whois.isp.net and
> contact the host specified by the A record owned by the SRV target.

Let's say that isp.net (gosh, they really exist) do not know about RFC2219
and run their whois service under the alias foobar.isp.net. How should an
SRV-cognizant whois client ever come to the idea of looking up an SRV of
the form "_whois._tcp.blafasel.isp.net"? This is precisely the problem that
we want to get rid of and with that interpretation of RFC2782 we are
reintroducing it again.

> Secondly, I feel a reminder that the target of an SRV must have an A RR
> is in order. Taking my isp.net example, above, again. If I controlled
> customer.com and wanted to use the mechanism in this draft to publish
> the fact that customer.com is in isp.net's whois server I cannot use:
>
> _whois._tcp.customer.com. IN SRV 10 0 43 whois.isp.net.
>
> as ``whois.isp.net'' does not have an A RR. I must ``undo'' the
> name indirection desired by isp.net and instead publish the following
> RRs (and keep them up to date):

Right, the reminder about the A RR is in order. On the other hand, this way
of "undoing the indirection" and trying to keep it up to date is not very
practical. Does somebody have any ideas on that?

> referred to as ``wacky mode'' - no offence is intended :-) If anybody
> wants to play with it, it's at
>
>  http://romana.now.ie/software/srv-whois

I really must be wacky, I cannot find it! :-P

Regards,
Marcos