"whois -h tools at xxx.net" ?

All,

  One of the impromptu things that turned out to be useful under the PRDB
was the ability to put up ad-hoc tools under the whois server.  Steve
Richardson wrote a lovely server that lets you type:

              whois -h prdb.merit.edu 'aggis 35/8'

to run "aggis" on "35/8", as well as doing more complicated things.  The
programs and reports are also available by other methods (ftp, www), but
whois turns out to be nice in that you walk a naive user through it over
the phone in a few seconds, without requiring that they bring a program
over and install it, install perl, etc.

  I'd like to replicate this kind of functionality for the RA, and it 
would be even nicer if we did this in a way that everyone liked so that
it became a normal IRR feature.

  Which leads to the following questions:

  1) Does this service look useful to anyone else?

  2) Is there a clean way to tie this into the RIPE-distribution whoisd?
We would need to distringuish whoisd queries from the other ones that need
to be passed to local programs.  Would any the following algorithm work:

     - Anything with a space in it ("aggis 35/8") is a special program?
          [But some queries can potentially allow spaces, no?]
     - Anything in a list of key names is a special program?  
          [But then this name space can overlap with, e.g., maintainer
           or community names and cause conflicts]
     - Anything sent to a totally separate whois server (whois -h
         tools.XXXX.net) is a separate program.  [Counter-intuitive;
	 folks will always be making mistakes].  [Or:  make it

		 finger "aggis 35/8"@finger.XXX.net   
	?]

(Our version looks for the first token on /usr/local/whois.bin;  if it
is there, run that as a program passing the rest of the string as 
parameters).

  3) Are folks willing to have the front-end of this be part of the 
standard IRR software?

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Mon Mar 27 20:44:40 MET DST 1995  ---------