Protocol Action: Architecture of the WHOIS++ service to Proposed Standard

IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary@CNRI.Reston.VA.US> Sun, 25 June 1995 15:19 UTC

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From: IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary@CNRI.Reston.VA.US>
Subject: Protocol Action: Architecture of the WHOIS++ service to Proposed Standard
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995 11:14:56 -0400
Message-ID: <9506251114.aa02209@IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US>

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft "Architecture of the WHOIS++
service" <draft-ietf-wnils-whois-arch-03.txt> as a Proposed Standard.

The IESG has also approved the publication of the Internet-Draft
"Whois and Network Information Lookup Service Whois++"
<draft-ietf-wnils-whois-lookup-01.txt> as an Informational RFC.

These documents are the product of the Whois and Network Information
Lookup Service Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Harald
Alvestrand, John KLensin, and Joyce K. Reynolds.


Technical Summary

 The "whois-arch" document describes a lookup service based on the old
 RFC 954 WHOIS service, which provides structured data and a fairly
 sophisticated search model, while keeping ASCII transactions.

 The authors believe that this, in conjunction with a distributed
 indexing mechanism, can provide the basis for an Internet directory
 service.

 The "whois-lookup" document describes a few requirements on the whois
 service; it is intended as an introduction, not a specification.


Working Group Summary

 The working group has recommended publication of this document. No
 significant issues were identified during Last Call.

Protocol Quality

 The protocol was reviewed for the IESG by Harald T. Alvestrand

 The protocol seems implementable to the untrained eye. Most difficult
 problems are made optional (language), or referred to further work
 (indexing). Internationalization issues are addressed, though not
 completely satisfactorily (output charset and language selection).
 The only specified security is cleartext passwords. There are several
 implementations of the protocol. Databases of up to six servers and
 20000 records have been running for several months.


Note: In the approval of this document for publication as a Proposed
Standard, the IESG has adopted the requirement that issues pertaining
to scaling be addressed (demonstrated) before this document is
considered for any standards track action in the future.

Protocol Action: Architecture of the WHOIS++ serv… IESG Secretary