I hate the new mail system

[Christian Corti]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2017, Tor Arntsen wrote:
> I did an strace and I can confirm that the Linux 'whois' client that I
> used from those various sites sends '-T dn' (or actually -T dn,ace)
>
>   write(3, "-T dn,ace uni-stuttgart.de\r\n", 28) = 28
>
> I can't see where this whois originates from, it has version number
> '5.2.<something>'. Its man page refers to RFC 3912, but RFC 3912 says
> nothing about -T.  RFC 3912's single example wouldn't have worked in
> this case. So I wonder what replaced RFC 3912, and why there's a
> mismatch between documentation and functionality.

I did a little research on that:
The '-T' option is passed to the whois server, it's not a client option. 
Intelligent or modern clients know what options to pass to the appropriate 
server, in this case '-T dn' to the DENIC whois server.
This option is completely legal and was introduced at DENIC in an attempt 
to better protect the domain holder's privacy (you know, different 
country, different rules). This was many years ago, but it's still there.
RFC 3912 doesn't specify what output the whois server is supposed to send. 
Everybody "assumes" that it should be the complete domain information, but 
that's simply not the case.
Imposing this assumption is what Mouse does, and that is wrong. Heck, I 
could even have a whois server that tells me the current weather forecast 
for a specific request ;-) It is a minimalistic directory service, nothing 
more.

Christian