On Sun, 21 Jun 1998, Jeff Williams wrote:

>   I suppose you are referring to me in this comment.  That is fine, but you are
> a bit off base with you comment, if I may say so.  First of all the
> InterNic's Whois facility does not just query the InterNics Database.  It also
> query's the 13 Legacy Root servers as well and any other Sub Domains that
> are known to those 13 Legacy Root servers.  That comprises about 98.5%
> of all the known DN's that are registered.  So I find your conclusion very
> misleading or you are misunderstood my previous posts on this subject.

Can you provide an example of this?

> > Please remember that a
> > large proportion of the Internet exists outside of the USA.  Just for a
> > start, it does not appear that most if not all subdomains of delegated ccTLDs
> > are listed.
> 
>   This is also not a correct statement either.  In fact I pointed out one such
> example of one that is listed that is a subdomain to .AU, that being .com.au.
> There are only 4 Routable subdomains to .au back to the 13 legacy root servers
> currently.  This is not to say that they are "Official" or "Authorized" crom
> within
> Australia, rather that the DN's registered under other subdomains/subnets to .au
> are not visible globally.

In that case, why does 'whois com.au' or 'whois com-au-dom' return 'no match'?
All the DN's under .AU are perfectly visible globally using the DNS - they just
don't appear under 'whois' (against the InterNIC DB), as distinct from AU.COM
and AU.NET, which are totally different domains.

>   Now I would like to inject here that we currently do not see this as a right or
> wrong situation per se.  Rather we believe that it is due to the current Legacy
> Root server DNS system that is currently what 98.5% or the IPv4 address
> space  Internet structure.  We believe that this structure is not in the best
> interest of the Internet community and I have stated such on many occasions.
> Hence our support for IRSC's that seek to be included or seek to change this
> structure to allow for alternative gTLD's and TLD's as well as additional
> interfacing IP address spaces that can expand the existing DNS and IP address
> space structure.

Sorry but I fail to see what this has to do with the point I am making.

> > With the lack of a widely-used whois referral mechanism, national
> > and regional NICs are not tied back to the InterNIC in an automatic fashion
> > (I for one would love to see this fixed).
> 
>   This is already fixed and has been for some time.  You can use many different
> Internet Network tools that are currently readily available for this purpose.  I
> have mentioned a few of them earlier on this list.  Examples are SATAN/SATAN PLUS,
> 
> Enterprise Network management system (Sun Microsystems) and Netview (IBM) are
> a few.  We use all of these tools and have built our own interface facility to
> interface
> them for better Network and Internet management.

Depends on your meaning of 'fixed'.  This should be fixed at the application
protocol level and not require 'tack-ons' to management systems.

Regards.
--
Chris Chaundy (Core Engineering Manager)

connect.com.au pty ltd, Level 9, 114 Albert Rd, Sth Melbourne, VIC 3205, Aust.
Internet: chris§connect.com.au   Phone: +61 3 9251-3671   Fax: +61 3 9251-3666