> Personally, I think the whois servers should just stop giving IP addresses > at all, they are so often wrong. For registrar whois servers, I'd agree, but for registry servers that are *supposed* to be kept up to date, I'd posit that unreliability of a data source is an indication of a problem to be fixed.
Okay, in theory I see your point; but in practice, . . .
Applications will always get their IP addresses from DNS, so where is the value in maintaining two data sets on two different protocols for same data? Any process that queries whois already has a DNS resolver (or it wouldn't be able to find the whois server in the first place), so it would be trivial to query the root nameservers for an IP address anyway.
Removing IP addresses from the whois data would reduce the propensity for error (which *is* a problem today), reduce the overhead for the registries (also a problem today) and reduce confusion for those who think the IP addresses in whois records are authoritative (they are not); all with no loss of data and no loss of access to data.
--Bill
->-- Bill Weinman <http://bw.org/> Music Database <http://www.webmusicdb.com/> Music <http://music.bw.org/> Whois Client <http://whois.bw.org> ->-+
