I hate the new mail system

On 08/03/2017 07:11, Tor Arntsen via cctalk wrote: This is rather intriguing. No, not the fault of the whois client. I repeated yesterday's tests and a few more because I'd closed the terminal windows I used yesterday, and also to try to eliminate any temporary aberrations. I did wonder if whois.denic.de is actually a load-balanced server farm and I just happened to be hitting a broken member of the farm and some of you guys weren't. But that does not seem to be the case. FWIW I was using linux whois-4.5.17 originally from www.linux.it, based on the RIPE whois client, compiled locally from source under IRIX. It's part of various Linux distributions and it works on hundreds of other whois servers; I use it frequently (part of my job) and never had a problem before. That's important because when I eventually found the "DENIC Public-Whois Documentation" I noted that it recommends the RIPE whois client. So just to be thorough I downloaded and compiled the latest RIPE whois on an Ubuntu Linux system and get a similar result with a standard query. I also downloaded and tested Microsoft's whois for Windows and got the same broken result, same "Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified" message. More importantly, I tested connecting directly using telnet to port 43, exactly as specified in RFCs 3912 and 954. Here it is again, showing the output of the (required) HELP command: $ telnet whois.denic.de 43 Trying 81.91.170.6... Connected to whois.denic.de. Escape character is '^]'. ? % SYNTAX: whois [-r] [-T types] [-C charset] key % % where our server understands the following options: % % -r turn off recursive lookups (default: on) % -T ace ACE input for domain lookup % -T domain (dn) only look for objects of type domain % -T status (st) only look for domain status % -C charset specify character set for the input/output % Available charsets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 (default) % % NOTE: Read the detailed documentation for valid argument combinations. There are two special queries % % [?, HELP, help] displays this text % alive at whois returns 'alive' if whois server runs properly % % Detailed documentation under https://www.denic.de/webwhois/?lang=en % Connection closed by foreign host. $ Notice that - unlike normal whois servers - this one apparently requires some other stuff, possibly including the text "whois", as part of the query. That may explain why a normal whois client gets an error, because the standard way to make a query is simply to send the string to query (eg, "uni-stuttgart.de" or "dunnington.cx"): $ whois -h whois.denic.de uni-stuttgart.de % Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified OK, so back to telnet, and try it with the syntax DENIC claims to want: $ telnet whois.denic.de 43 Trying 81.91.170.6... Connected to whois.denic.de. Escape character is '^]'. -T dn uni-stuttgart.de [lots of output] $ Aha! That works. But I can't replicate it with most whois clients. However, it /does/ work with the jwhois client, which some linux systems have, and which seems to have some special method to deal with DENIC. It doesn't work with the RIPE client - despite DENIC recommending that - unless you construct a rather odd-looking query by adding at least "--T dn": gleek:whois3-3.2.2 $ ./whois -h whois.denic.de uni-stuttgart.de Domain: uni-stuttgart.de Status: connect gleek:whois3-3.2.2 $ gleek:whois3-3.2.2 $ ./whois -h whois.denic.de --T dn uni-stuttgart.de [lots of output] gleek:whois3-3.2.2 $ So IMHO it's broken; it doesn't respond to a standard query format as defined in the RFCs, but only to a modified query string, one which some perfectly good clients can't correctly format. Just for comparison, I also tested the RIPE client, Microsoft client, and telnet with some .co.uk, .ac.uk, .com, .cn and .cx domains using several whois servers, and found a standard query worked every time. Obviously that's not exhaustive but so far whois.denic.de is the only one I've found with this odd behaviour. -- Pete Pete Turnbull