"whois -h tools at xxx.net" ?

Daniel,

[cc: rr-impl added]

>   > "Dale S. Johnson" <dsj at merit.edu> writes:
>   > > Re-inventing rsh ...?
>   > 
>   > I don't understand what you are trying to imply here.  First, rsh is
>   > restricted to a small number of pre-registered users.  Second, rsh is
>   > unrestricted shell access, rather than a small set of commands.  rsh
>   > is also basically extinct under well-administered systems.
>   > 
>   > Implementing a world-executable, secure rsh using standard distribution
>   > clients?  Yes.
> 
> I remain unconvined that it has to be inside the WHOIS service.
> Especially if you want to put it on a special port after all.
> I do not see how this belongs under the whois service.
> I am not saying the functionality is not useful. I am just saying that
> blindly adding it to whoisd since one happens to code there maybe needs
> some further thought.

Agreed.

> Why not use f.i. telnet ?
...
>   > [PS:  We've been running this for a year or so, and the folks who have
>   > to talk to the customers find it increasingly useful as we have to deal
>   > with less- and less-educated newbies.]
> 
> I am not saying it isn't useful. I am just saying "why the whois service".

Mmmm...  telnet is possible.  We actually use both telnet and whois to
the radbserver port when we want either multiple- or single-shot
commands.  The server doesn't care which client gets used.

Telnet has the advantage that it all ready has an optional port number.
It has the disadvantages that there is no way to make the standard client
read from stdin (it reads from /dev/tty, or some such), so it is impossible
to script without using something awful like Expect.  Telnet is also 
noisy, putting out four lines of overhead for every connection:

>    (dsj at radb2: 779) telnet radb.ra.net 5042
>    Trying 198.108.0.8...
>    Connected to radb.ra.net.
>    Escape character is '^]'.
...
>    Connection closed by foreign host.

and it tends to want to be in conversational mode;  either you just have
to hang up on it ("Connection closed..."), or leave the user in some
kind of a menu or command-prompter.  It will work, but its kind of ugly.

Whois and finger are both one-shot commands that can talk to the same
servers.  Neither supports a port number in the normal distributed
clients, so you either have to replace the existing servers, to
integrate with them, or to move to some other machine and replace
them there (e.g. setting up "whois -h tools.ra.net", which is a 
different machine than "whois.ra.net").  Both are "clean" in that the
clients don't clutter the output with extra text lines.

Whois, of course, doesn't conflict wth any existing server on most
machines, whereas finger does.

Obviously, I'm working hard to make the server work without forcing users
to download and compile client code.  This is partly based on my supporting
code for 20+ Unix platforms in a previous life ("portability" is a guru
skill with a half-life of six months;  much like "security").  Then
we made a stab at supporting downloadable clients a couple of years ago
for the PRDB, too;  and backed off to whois because people who were trying
to solve current problems wanted the answer now and didn't want to 
download a client and coax it through their variant of a C compiler (or
make it work under Perl 5, or have to install Perl, or deal with their
local system administrator...)

---

BTW:  Laurent made what I think is a good point about whois clients:
if the IRR *is* going to support a special whois client, it would be
good for it to move the server-specific "help" query into the server,
rather than hardcoding it in the client.  "Help" and options are all
ready different for the NIC, the standard RIPE server, and the
RADBserver;  and soon (probably) for tools.ra.net.  I think it is great
to have a whois client people can get with extra flag passing and a
port function, but it would be good if this client was appropriate for
all the servers.

Maybe we should even update the whois RFC, to define parameter passing
along these lines?

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Tue Apr 4 21:35:00 MET DST 1995  ---------