Ripe change to whois

I feel this is more appropriate to be discussed on the db-wg.

Mirjam Kuehne
RIPE NCC

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Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 19:21:13 +0200
To: <local-ir at ripe.net>
From: Hank Nussbacher <hank at ibm.net.il>
Subject: Ripe change to whois

I may have missed it, but a serious *bad* change has occured to the whois
interface. Previously, if I did a check on abcdef.co.il and abcdef did not
exist, whois would return an error message.  Now, whois returns the domain
and role records for the next upper level domain - i.e. co.il or .il.  Other
examples:  zzzz.ac.uk, zzzz.ac.at.  

How did I find out about this?  I received 3 phone calls already in the past
24 hours from users in Israel stating that I personally am registered as
owner of hundreds of domains.  They state that being on the board of the
ISOC-IL which oversees the registration, I have violated the rules (limit of
10 domains per person - other countries have similar restrictions).  I have
tried explaining to them that I am not the owner of these domains.  If it
was 1 user, I would assume they didn't read the entry correctly.  But the
fact that 3 totally different people have called me to ask whether I would
sell certain domain names to them, I can only conclude that the RIPE change
is not that successful.
People have been used to getting an error message from RIPE, similar to the
"No match" one gets from Internic.  When they now get a valid response, they
don't bother to check that the response is not for the domain they
requested.  There is no error message or error code.

This needs to be rectified (and changes discussed in the future - ignore if
it has been mentioned).

- -Hank Nussbacher
ISOC-IL board member




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