[gtld-tech] whois bootstrap, was [weirds] Search Engines Indexing RDAP Server Content

[Marc Blanchet]

On 8 Feb 2016, at 19:38, John Levine wrote:

>> Taking IANA as a leading source is what we do as far as the 
>> information
>> exists, and maybe from that side a 'wrapper' like $tld.whois.iana.org
>> could be provided. I know there is such functionality around but I've
>> never found one that is 100% free of errors.
>
> I have a WHOIS locator list updated daily at <tld>.ws.sp.am.  (WS is
> Whois Server.)
>
> It uses a variety of methods to find the servers, the IANA list, the
> common whois.nic.<tld>, and a manual list for the ones that are just
> hard to find.  As far as I know it's correct and complete.

that is the whole problem. everyone currently has own secret sauce to 
find those. we need some authoritative way to get the servers one is 
looking for, in a predictable and standard way. RDAP bootstrap, while 
not perfect, do provide that capability.

Marc.

>
> Oh, and it's DNSSEC signed, too, although that doesn't help much since
> very few of the WHOIS names it points to are.
>
> R's,
> John