Whois Enhancement BOF (whoisfix) Thursday, August 09 at 1530-1730 ================================== CHAIR: Eric Brunner-Williams ANNOUNCEMENT ------------ Yet another attempt will be made to create a working group providing minimal enhancements to the WHOIS (port 43) service. This BOF will review a proposed charter and a proposed specification for enhancements. This round of effort will be marked by extremely narrow focus and extremely tight management to maintain that focus. The technical goals for the enhancement effort will be to: specify a common, structured query format, specify a means for server query redirection, specify server-server queries, and specify standardized whois structured response formats. Character set and data protection (privacy) issues are included in the query and response format goals. PROPOSED CHARTER ---------------- Whois is a public-access query service that provides essential operations information for locating technical points of contact associated with domains and networks. Current Whois (rfc954) service suffers from an incomplete core specification, which may be summarized using familiar notation as: C: [::printable::]\r\n S: .*\r\n This working group will specify a common, structured query format, a means for server query redirection, server-server queries, and standardized whois structured response formats. Unmodified clients will interwork with modified servers and modified clients must be able to interwork with unmodified servers. The working group will NOT specify the detail of data to be provided when using the protocol. The working group will NOT consider other functional enhancements to the service. All such considerations are deferred to other efforts, for protocols using ports other than port 43. Goals and Milestones: Sep 01 Initial specification of structured data response format, and protocol redirection to an alternate server Dec 01 Initial specification of structured query format Jan 02 Revised drafts Mar 02 Drafts submitted for consideration as Proposed Standard AGENDA: ---------------- 5 min -- introduction, agenda bashing, scribe pressing 5 min -- charter bashing 15 min -- RIR state-of-whois overview (requirements) 15 min -- TLD state-of-whois overview (requirements) 15 min -- prior work ------ 5 min -- break ------ 5 min -- requirements document 30 min -- design team: queries & formats 10 min -- testbed(s) and transition(s) document 5 min -- interactions with other WGs 5 min -- wrap-up 10 min -- it isn't whois:43 trademark & law enforcement & LDAP ------ 2 hours Total