Referral Whois BOF (RWHOIS)

Reported by Mark Kosters/InterNIC and Stan Borinski/InterNIC



Agenda

   o Introduction
   o Development Status
      -  Secondaries
      -  On-line Editing
   o Deployment Issues
      -  Minimal Attribute Sets
      -  Commonality of Attributes
   o RWhois Specification Changes
   o Become a Working Group


Summary

Scott Williamson presented an introduction on the main points of the
RWhois protocol with hierarchical examples on how a registry can
delegate information to sub-registries for network, domain, and contact
information.  He then went on to discuss the current InterNIC
Registration Services development status on the RWhois server and our
current pushes -- namely the secondary and on-line editing capabilities.

Discussion ensued on the current state of the centrally maintained
server, the performance, and the configuration leading up to how RWhois
would be able to assume that load.  It was felt by the InterNIC
Registration Services that RWhois will be able to handle the load since
RWhois allows for secondary servers to distribute the query load.  Scott
Williamson proposed that minimally APNIC and RIPE house secondary
servers.

There were suggestions of various supplemental enhancements to the
client as in auto-configuration for the root server, and reducing the
functionality of the server by transferring the display capability of
the server to the client.  It was also agreed to drop the requirement
that a RWhois server support boolean operations from the next version of
the specification.

In order for RWhois to perform correctly, a minimal common attribute set
for each object needs to be defined for the navigational elements.
There was consensus within the group that the rwhois list should be used
and quickly come to closure.

At the conclusion, it was agreed that RWhois should become a working
group in order to facilitate the operational deployment of RWhois within
the Internet community.


Action Items

Scott Williamson and Mark Kosters will formulate a charter and submit it
to the Operational Requirements Area Directors for review.