Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-sanz-whois-srv-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 12:25:45 -0400

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: Using DNS SRV records to locate whois servers
	Author(s)	: M. Sanz, G. Winkler
	Filename	: draft-sanz-whois-srv-01.txt
	Pages		: 7
	Date		: 2004-4-5
	
Whois servers are used to locate administrative, technical and 
security contacts for given IP addresses, domain names or other 
network objects associated with an organisation, e.g. AS numbers. 
While usually Top Level Domain (TLD) registries run a whois server, 
there is no generic name for it and it may not even be obvious that 
the TLD registry's whois server is the right one to ask, since there 
are TLDs where registration takes place under specialised second 
level domains (e.g. UK, AT). The Regional Internet Registries (RIR) 
also provide whois service as part of their coordination task. 
All this can be solved by central 'master' or 'meta' whois servers, 
which keep track of all new and changing servers and refer to the DNS 
registries' or RIRs' whois servers. 
This document proposes a DNS-based approach which eliminates the need 
for a central master repository and works down to lower levels in the 
hierarchy. It is the intent to locate a whois server as close to the 
target (in terms of hierarchy) as possible, while preserving the 
opportunity to locate higher level servers for escalation purposes.

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