Small fix to whoisd.pl

On Wed, 3 May 1995 14:56:52 -0400 (EDT)  Laurent Joncheray wrote:
> 	It is an old issue but...
> 	why don't you port whoisd to be called from [x]inetd. So you
> won't need any networking hack. It has been like that on radb.ra.net,
> and it seems to be fine.
> 		Laurent
> PS: lot of advantages: do not need to run as root, IP filtering, logging,

I just did some measurements; I did a 10 queries to the standard whois
service, and one running via inetd, and found:
direct:	25.25s
inetd:   5.00s
direct whois is 5 times faster.

This is averaged over a number of measurements on the same machine,
and local (2 hops ether) network.

This is probably why httpd servers want to run standalone, instead of
via inetd. Note that I needed to hack whoisd to make it work under
inetd (David whispered something about a fix being available from
Merit, but I didn't have it so I butchered the code to do this;
I'm not a perl programmer)

The big difference is probably caused by perl initializing, as it
'compiles' the perl script every time it starts; some debug-prints
made that quite clear.

It seems that we can have either a safe whois, or a fast whois;
I can think of a port relay program (yech), or a kernel hack
to unprivilege port 43 (that's what I would do).

Geert Jan




-------- Logged at  Thu May 4 23:37:40 MET DST 1995  ---------