"whois -h tools at xxx.net" ?

Dale S. Johnson (dsj at merit.edu) on March 27:
> All,
> 
>   One of the impromptu things that turned out to be useful under the PRDB
> was the ability to put up ad-hoc tools under the whois server.  Steve
> Richardson wrote a lovely server that lets you type:
> 
>               whois -h prdb.merit.edu 'aggis 35/8'
> 
> to run "aggis" on "35/8", as well as doing more complicated things.  The
> programs and reports are also available by other methods (ftp, www), but
> whois turns out to be nice in that you walk a naive user through it over
> the phone in a few seconds, without requiring that they bring a program
> over and install it, install perl, etc.
> 
>   I'd like to replicate this kind of functionality for the RA, and it 
> would be even nicer if we did this in a way that everyone liked so that
> it became a normal IRR feature.
> 
>   Which leads to the following questions:
> 
>   1) Does this service look useful to anyone else?
> 
>   2) Is there a clean way to tie this into the RIPE-distribution whoisd?
> We would need to distringuish whoisd queries from the other ones that need
> to be passed to local programs.  Would any the following algorithm work:
> 
>      - Anything with a space in it ("aggis 35/8") is a special program?
>           [But some queries can potentially allow spaces, no?]

This is not acceptable, even if it is OK to do so today. We have to
think of tomorrow.

>      - Anything in a list of key names is a special program?  
>           [But then this name space can overlap with, e.g., maintainer
>            or community names and cause conflicts]

This is probably OK. Perhaps you should require a single keyword "run":
	whois -h prdb.merit.edu 'run aggis 35/8'

>      - Anything sent to a totally separate whois server (whois -h
>          tools.XXXX.net) is a separate program.  [Counter-intuitive;
> 	 folks will always be making mistakes].  [Or:  make it
> 
> 		 finger "aggis 35/8"@finger.XXX.net   
> 	?]
> 
> (Our version looks for the first token on /usr/local/whois.bin;  if it
> is there, run that as a program passing the rest of the string as 
> parameters).
> 
>   3) Are folks willing to have the front-end of this be part of the 
> standard IRR software?
> 
> --Dale


Cengiz

-- 
Cengiz Alaettinoglu       Information Sciences Institute
(310) 822-1511            University of Southern California
http://www.isi.edu/div7/people/cengiz.home



-------- Logged at  Mon Mar 27 20:57:34 MET DST 1995  ---------