Hello Andrew!
Sunday June 10 2001, "Andrew M. Bishop" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> When I added the finger protocol I did think that a whois lookup would
> also be useful.
Ah, good. So I'm not completely alone with that idea. ;-)
> I was trying to think of other things that would be usefully requested
> when offline and cached for later use. Other than whois the only one
> that I thought of was PGP public keys.
I use PGP 2.6.3in, so I may not get the point entirely, but caching of
PGP keys doesn't seem too useful to me - I use my PGP keyring for that.
Offline requesting does sound like a good idea though. Unfortunately
(not really, from my POV) PGP2 doesn't talk to keyservers. I use either
mail or a web interface to do that.
> I will add the whois lookup to the TODO list.
Thanks.
I just had one thought: Because there is only a small number of whois
servers for so many domains and netblocks, you would get a lot of files
in the respective cache directories. Or, in the case of "meta" servers
like whois.thur.de, all the queries would even end up in the same dir.
I hope that won't become a problem.
> The only problem that I have with it is that the request is more
> variable that for finger.
Ouch. I didn't know that. But as you say:
> I don't see that this should be a big problem though.
I just tried to request a URL including a space using wget and found
that it automatically replaces the space with "%20", OTOH, Netscape
doesn't.
> (see RFC 945 for examples)
It never ceases to amaze me what kinds of documents you can find among
the RFCs. I now know that the DoD prefers TCP/IP on packet-oriented
data networks. ;-)
(Yes, I have also read RFC 954.)
> Another alternative for the current time is to find a web server with
> a form that allows whois lookups. These requests can be cached by
> WWWOFFLE already.
Unfortunately, the only one I currently know does not put the query in
the URL of the results page, so I can't use it with wget. And I was
hoping to avoid having to start Netscape just for that.
--
|_|\ Fido: 2:2461/332.27, 2:244/1351.27
| |/ PGP: 2047/962CC1B5 1996/04/05
GCS d- s:+>:- a- C++(+++) US P L+ E- W++(-) N++(*) K-- w-- O++ M- V? PS+
PE Y+ PGP+ t+ 5(+) X(+) R tv++ b+ DI- D+ G+ e h! r++(---) y*
