I am currently working on a windows WHOIS client actually :) I expect it to be ready in about a week (and yes it will be open source). - Cynthia On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 7:34 AM Hank Nussbacher via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
On 28/07/2019 05:19, Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg wrote:
I myself am an old school die hard UNIX guy from way back, but recently I have been wanting to shared certain information relating to certain WHOIS records with some other folks, some of whom are strictly and only Windows users.
Are there any WHOIS clients available for Windows that provide the full range of RIPE WHOIS options? If not why not? (Sad as it may be, Windows is still used by about 90% of everybody, so it seems odd that WHOIS clients are only built for UNIX and UNIX-like systems.)
I continue to use Cyberkit 2.5 from 2001 which allows me the full range of whois options.
I would love to hear of something more up to date to replace it.
-Hank
Has anyone ever tried to build the RIPE WHOIS client, from sources, on Windows? If so, what was the result?
I have been telling my Windows-only friends to try to get WHOIS info from, for example, whois.ripe.net, by just using telnet and connecting to port 43 and then typing in their options and search keys, but as I have learned, the results in that case are entirely sub-optimal.
If you do this, you will get a "stairstep" set of output lines,
apparently
because the output of whois.ripe.net, like most other WHOIS servers, assumes that ends-of-lines should be represented by just <LF> and not by the <CR><LF> sequence that is formally required for most other protocols. (The latter is fine for UNIX and UNIX-like systems, while the former is generally needed for Windows systems.)
The original RFCs covering WHOIS (RFC 812 and RFC 954) were rather entirely ambiguous about how response lines should be terminated, however the newer RFC 3912, Section 3, strongly hints that response lines should be terminated with <CR><LF> even though it fails to ever come out and say that explicitly.
So, is the whois.ripe.net WHOIS server failing to be standard confoming?
Regardless of whether it is or isn't I really do need a WHOIS client that I can give to my various Windows-only friends.
Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.
Regards, rfg