The gateway to Whois servers
murphy@dccs.upenn.edu
Date: Fri, 7 May 93 13:27:52 -0400
From: murphy@dccs.upenn.edu
Message-id: <9305071727.AA23826@lam.dccs.upenn.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, gopher-news@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Subject: The gateway to Whois servers
Reply-To: murphy@scotty.dccs.upenn.edu
I have a question about the gateway to whois, the items in this gopher
menu: gopher.tc.umn.edu 70 1/Phone Books/WHOIS Searches
The question is: Does the use of this gateway really have to _double_
the usage of a Whois server? I've noticed that for many months now,
the SAME EXACT query would come into the Penn whois server within
seconds of each other, but from two different hosts.
Between approximately 11:44 AM and 12:54 PM (a little over an hour)
today, the log shows these lines (as well as a bunch of others which
were all from on-campus hosts, so I've omitted them):
736789471 1 1 3 morrison GOPHER.ND.EDU
736789477 2 1 3 morrison MOZART.HELIOS.ND.EDU
736790867 1 3 1 williams, scott GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790870 1 3 1 williams, scott LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736790903 2 1 1 chance GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790905 1 1 1 chance LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736790930 2 3 0 smith, amos GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790933 1 3 0 smith, amos LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736791061 2 1 0 Alstair Ling GOPHER.ND.EDU
736791078 4 1 0 Alstair Ling ERNIE.PRINCETON.EDU
736791110 2 1 2 Ling GOPHER.ND.EDU
736791114 1 1 2 Ling ERNIE.PRINCETON.EDU
736793362 2 1 0 anthropology GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793369 2 1 0 anthropology ARX.ADP.WISC.EDU
736793606 2 1 2 keane GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793609 1 1 2 keane WINGRA.ADP.WISC.EDU
736793694 1 1 0 philadelphia GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793697 1 1 0 philadelphia WINGRA.ADP.WISC.EDU
Using Whois servers in this fashion is quite inefficient, and
irresponsible. At the moment, whois queries are not terribly
expensive for us, but if they were, the gateway usage of this machine
would be crushing our server. Please explain why the gateway behaves
so strangely, and what plans there are to fix this problem.
--lam