[afnog] Re: Need Whois server

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

> 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:

Yes it is. But it can be even more simple to use an existing program.

[Disclaimer: the rest of the message is a blatant ad for my program.]

You could use GenericWhois to develop your whois server. GenericWhois
is a generic whois (RFC 3912) server. It separates the front-end,
which deals with the whois protocol, network issues, rate limiting,
blacklisting, etc, and the back end which is highly registry-specific
and deals with the business rules, the interface with the actual data
store, etc.

To write your own backend (which is almost mandatory, unless you find
a suitable backend), see the comments in WhoisBackEnd.py. You'll need
to use the Python language <URL:http://www.python.org/>. If you are
familiar with Python, it typically takes one hour to develop a
back-end for a new registry. Several examples of back-ends are
available in the source.

GenericWhois is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence. 

GenericWhois was developed by AFNIC for the Generic NIC project. You
can download it from
http://www.generic-nic.net/sheets/practical/GenericWhois-0.0-BETA.tar.gz.