> I've never seen this discussed here, so I'll make some noise. I'll bite (but only answer the questions that I can)....
> > When I do a `whois tucows.info`, I'm told that the registrar for that > domain is R139-LRMS. I can `whois -h whois.afilias.net "ID R R139-LRMS"` > to get contact details for that registrar, but the WHOIS out does not > appear to include a URL for an HTTP reference. > Keep in mind that this isn't your daddy's Oldsmobile. Afilias is EPP based, so a lot of the textual goop that holds things together in the RRP is gone. R139(registrar 139)-LRMS(Liberty Registry Management Services) is the unique ID (forget the actual object name) for the registrar in question. You raise some good points about the human readability of the strings that could be filtered by the whois server, but, this thing was built strictly to spec, which means it doesn't do that kind of thing today. I will definitely make sure that this gets put on the feature list for OpenXRS, but I can't guarantee that Afilias, or even Liberty (as Liberty's customer and Tucows customer respectively) will bite. > URLs for registrars are provided by Afilias *on their web site* at > http://www.afilias.info/cgi-bin/registrar-id.cgi, but why the heck > aren't they providing the same info in the WHOIS record? Is it just > a silly oversight, like the fact that the CIRA whois server doesn't > include expiry dates while the web site does? Anybody know if this > is intentional? > > And what about DNS servers? Is there some *reason* that info domains > have no DNS servers listed via whois (I mean, other than the obvious > fact that Afilias isn't bound by Verisign's policies)? > > And ... here's another. A look at the root.zone file from verisign-grs > points .info delegation to TLD[12].NOMINUM.COM. Who is Nominum, and > what is their relation to Afilias? > Nominum is Paul Vixie's DNS management spin-off from ISC. They run a really cool global DNS infrastructure. -rwr
