[afnog] Need Whois server

[Brian Candler]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 04:55:06PM +0100, dosfrk at opt.bj wrote:
> Thank everyone,
> I'm actually building our nic website http://www.nic.bj 
> to provide information about .bj with an online whoisclient to query 
> .bj domains
> I think that i have to install first a whois server and after a web whois 
> client .

If the only interface you are providing to the outside world is web, then
you don't need to use the 'whois' protocol internally at all; just query
your database directly, and display the results on the web. Then there's no
need to duplicate your data in a separate whois database.

If you have an existing database, and want to allow people to query it
directly using the 'whois' protocol, then you might just want to write a
whois server directly in whatever language you are using (perl, php, ruby
etc). The protocol is trivially simple:

$ telnet org.whois-servers.net 43
Trying 129.33.96.137...
Connected to whois.publicinterestregistry.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
afnog.org         << type this (the domain to query)
Domain ID:D6954436-LROR
Domain Name:AFNOG.ORG
Created On:01-Jun-1999 21:29:17 UTC
... etc

See RFC954, RFC2167

Regards,

Brian.